Rob's Ramblings

This is a followup to my previous post on this topic, and a solution found.

Thanks to comments here and from House of Fusion, I learned that Verity does not work on Macintosh OS X. An alternate solution must be found. Thanks in part to Dave Watts of Figleaf, I found it.

Setting Up Verity

From Dave's suggestion, I installed CF9 on an OS that has Verity - Windows in my case.I have an instance of WinXP SP3 running via VMware Fusion. I have the network adapter set up for NAT, so it gets it's own internal IP address.

I installed it as a standalone edition with the local web server on port 8500. After installation I ran the web-based config to get it all up and running. At that point, I disabled all the CF services except for the ColdFusion Search Services, which is set to Automatic. I went into Windows Firewall and opened up the three ports Verity uses.

I went back into my OS X CF admin, and changed the Verity K2 host to the IP address of my Windows instance. Tried to connect to the service and.... nothing. At this point it was 1700 on Friday so I shut down and took the weekend off from this.

I returned to this task this morning with a fresh head, and found some documentation on CF's instance of Verity. It only allows connections from one machine, and by default it is set up to be 127.0.0.1. A search found this address in two XML files in my C:\ColdFusion9\verity\Data\host directory, as well as the C:\ColdFusion9\verity\verity-install.cfg file. I went into all three files, and changed the IP address and mask from 127.0.0.1 and 255.255.255.255 to my OS X internal IP address and a mask of 255.255.255.0. I restarted the ColdFusion Search service on Windows. I cannot tell you for certain which change was the difference maker, but when I refreshed the ColdFusion Collections link on my OS X CF9 admin server, it was connected to the Windows verity!

Fun with soft links

The next task was to set up the collection that I was going to use. The function to do the indexing is set up to create the collection first if it does not exist.

As a reminder, my QA and production environment are Unix boxes, which does have Verity support from CF. On it, CF is set up in the /opt/coldfusion directory. Therefore the verity collections are in /opt/coldfusion/verity/collections/. I have been very strict in making sure that my local development environment on OS X mimics the directory structures used on QA and production, using soft links where needed. So on OS X, I created /opt, and inside /opt created a soft link for "coldfusion" to link to my /Applications/ColdFusion9/ directory.

The path to the verity folder is /opt/coldfusion/verity/collections/. My first instict was that CF would create the directories as needed. I ran my indexing template, and got back the following:

The collection was reindexed. 0 records have been inserted. 0 records have been updated.

Not what I was expecting. I looked in my /Applications/ColdFusion9 directory, and saw no new "verity" directory created. So where was it? I looked on my WinXP instance in C:\ColdFusion9\verity\collections, and saw no new collections created there. I was stumped until I looked at the C:\ drive, and found an "opt" directory there. Expanding it, I found C:\opt\coldfusion\verity\collections\ and my collection inside there!

Now knowing what had happened, I needed to link OS X to that verity folder. I shared the C:\opt\coldfusion\verity folder on Windows, and mounted it in OS X. I then went into /Applications/ColdFusion9, and made a soft link to the mount point for the verity shared folder at /Volumes/verity. So now /opt/coldfusion/verity links properly to the C:\opt\coldfusion\verity on Windows. I think I've got it all, so I run the index again.

The collection was reindexed. 0 records have been inserted. 0 records have been updated.

Huh?

The Final Hurdle - proper location of the documents

Looking in the CF9 admin, I read this:

Because you have a remote K2 server configured, you must ensure that the documents to be indexed are accessible from the ColdFusion server machine as well as the computer on which the K2 search services run.

And that's when I realized that the documents to be indexed couldn't be on OS X, they had to be on windows. I created an uploads directory on Windows, and shared it. I mounted the share on OS X. Then, again mimicing our QA and production structure, I soft linked the root uploads directory to the mount point (/Volumes/uploads).

A final running of the indexing returned this:

The collection was reindexed. 106 records have been inserted. 0 records have been updated.

Wahoo! And a test of the search returned results as expected!

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