What happened to RIPE Database full text search?

Dear all,

 "Christian Panigl, ACOnet/UniVie" <panigl at cc.univie.ac.at> writes:
 *     Hi Joao,
 *     
 *     not only full text search doesn't work but also
 *     ftp.ripe.net/ripe/dbase/split/* files are empty !!!
 *     
 *     Is this a related problem ?  

Yes. One triggered the other.

 * Are you already working on that ? 

It is already solved.
The full text search indexes will take longer.

To explain a bit more what happened:

One of our developers deleted a little script (a perl one-liner used to clean 
deleted objects from the database files before generating the copies for the 
ftp site and the glimpse full text search engine, not a part of the database) 
from the source development trees (handled by CVS).

When the full code was checked out to put the release together the absence of 
this script went unnoticed.

The missing script made the automatic night job, that creates the ftp files 
and the glimpse indexes, stop half way through and empty files ended in the 
ftp site.

We normally monitor these but Murphy paid us a visit and we were not doing so 
for the last 2 days.

What we are doing to prevent this from happening again:

- Going through a full review of all our checking procedures to prevent this 
and see if there are any other potential places for errors. I guess no system 
is entirely foolproof but our aim is to make the whole database setup as 
resilient as possible. So a complete check is never a bad thing.

- Improve the monitoring of the several services that together constitute the 
RIPE DB service.

This has been a bad month for us but we are determined to not let it happen 
again.

Best regards,
Joao Damas
RIPE NCC