Google Search Appliance

The marketing department have paid for two Google search Appliances!

Until we move into our new data centre, they will be hosted in the DMZs of two of the company's other large sites and index the company's external websites replacing the current search function.

Other than the agreement to manage the hosting of these boxes, IT weren't involved in the purchasing. Which in retrospect is probably a "bad decision".

Looking through the documentation about the number of webpages the appliance can index, I think Google Mini Appliances should have been purchased.

Marketing must have sized their purchase based upon their expectation that these boxes will sit in the DMZ and be able to create separate indexes of both external facing and internal facing websites. The index of external facing pages will be visible externally and internally, the internal indexes will only be visible internally.

That just won't wash with our IT Security dept, who are some of the most "conservative", i.e. paranoid people you'll happen to meet. IT Security will expect (at the very least, push) Marketing to purchase an additional box(es) for the Internal sites.

In this situation, four Google Mini Appliances could have been purchased for less than the cost of the two Google Search Appliances that actually were purchased.

Politics aside, what is the hardware like?


Well, it is a "nice" yellow re-badged Dell box.

It arrives locked and no key is sent. I searched the box twice looking for one and called over a colleague to also check the packaging. If there is a hardware fault, you have to call Google! Which is one way to ensure your annual support revenue is paid up.

Installation is nice and easy. There is a good description here of the installation process.
It is straightforward, although requiring knowledge of the infrastructure, i.e. network gateways, SMTP hosts, etc.
The most important step is the setting of the NTP servers as without at least one NTP server registration cannot complete!


The next page would show you all the settings aggregated as a confirmation of the configuration.

You'll notice there were some errors during configuration. This box is in our DMZ. Ping isn't allowed or perhaps more precisely is FireWalled on the DMZ. But the errors are that the Gateway, SMTP and NTP servers are not pingable. Which really all makes me wonder which millennium Google are living in?! It doesn't matter if you can ping an SMTP or NTP server! Can they "talk" their protocols? It doesn't matter that the Gateway isn't pingable, can the box GET the www.google.com homepage?

And that's that.