Note: To complete the procedures in this document, you need to be assigned a role that has the necessary permissions. To find out what your role is, follow the directions in Participant roles. To see a list of what permissions are associated with a given role, see Permissions, roles, and tools. For a basic understanding of roles and permissions, see Permissions and Roles: Overview.
Users with the Site Update permission may administer aspects of the search engine for the site. Instance administrators, for example the admin user, are allowed to administer all aspects of the search engine. These users are allowed access to the administration page of the Search Tool. This page gives these users access to parts of the Search Engine which is used by the Search Tool.
The Administration page shows information about the indexing worker threads in the server cluster, and their state. It also shows information concerning the current index queue.
Index Queue: The index queue is a queue of indexing commands that are enacted upon by search indexer threads. These commands take 3 forms.
Global Commands (Rebuild Whole Index, Refresh Whole Index, Remove Lock) Only instance administrators are allowed to perform Global operations. These operations are, rebuild, refresh and release lock. Global Rebuild deletes the entire index, and requests that all tools in the system resubmit all content to the search engine for re-indexing. This operation should only be performed with caution, since a large site may take several hours to complete this operation. Global Refresh, is only sightly more drastic as it takes all the content known to the search engine, and refreshed the index. Whilst this command is being enacted upon by the indexer threads, the search index will still contain all of the content. The release lock command should only be issued if the operator is certain that the indexer thread that is supposed to be performing the current index operaiton has died. This should almost never be necessary, as each indexer thread emits a heartbeat to the cluster that conforms its health. If any indexer thread that has not emited a heartbeat, or has become overdue has a writer lock on the index, it will have that lock removed by one of the other indexer threads, which will allow one of the other indexer threads to recover the indexing operation.
Site Commands:(Rebuild Site Index, Refresh Site Index) Site administrators or maintainers are allowed to issues refresh and rebuild commands against the site which they maintain.
Refresh Status: This simply refreshed the page to give you an update on the status of the engine.
The first block of inforation informs you when the index was last loaded by the Index Searcher on the cluster node you are connected to. It also informs you of current index activity, which may be none if no indexing is being performed, or a indexer thread id and an expected time of completion if there is an index oepration in progress. The final information item in this block is the state of the index and the index queue.
Mater Control Records informs you of the state of any global commands in the index queue. Site Control Records informs you of the state of any work site control records in the index queue. This will include commands from sites other than the ones that you maintain.
Index Workers provides a list of all indexer threads in the Sakai cluster. In this list is the ID of the thread, the last time a heartbeat was received, and the current state of the thread, either idle or running. If the thread its ID will be present in the first information block with an extimated time of completion.
Finally there is a block of inforamtion about the search index segments that are used by the search engine to store its state.