Administering the search servers in stand-alone mode

To ensure high availability of the search servers, you can start the search servers for individual collections even if the master server is not running.

Before you begin

The ability to start and stop the search servers in stand-alone mode is not available from the administration console. If the index server is not running, the administration console cannot be accessed.

Before you can start and stop the search servers in stand-alone mode, ensure that the crawler, document processing, and search servers for the collection have all been started at least once. This is necessary to ensure that required files are synchronized on the search servers.

If document-level security is enabled for the collection, ensure that the crawler server is also started. This is necessary to ensure that document-level security controls can be enforced. If the crawler server is not running, only documents that do not require authentication are returned in the query results.

About this task

If the master server is unavailable, you can ensure that users are able to continue searching the system by starting the search servers in stand-alone mode. You can run the commands for starting and stopping the search servers from any server in a multiple server installation. The commands attempt to start or stop the search servers for the specified collection on all available search servers.

Procedure

To start or stop the search servers in stand-alone mode:

Start the search servers for a collection:
1. On the crawler server and search servers, log in as the default Watson Explorer Content Analytics administrator and then start the common communication layer (CCL) service:
  AIX® or Linux
  
  startccl.sh -bg
  
  Windows command prompt
  
  startccl
  
  Windows Services administrative tool
  To start CCL in the background:
  1. Launch Windows Services: Start > Programs > Administrative Tools > Services.
  2. Right-click IBM® Watson Explorer Content Analytics and click Start.
2. On the search servers, run the following command:
  esadmin system startLocal
3. Enter the following command, where collection_id identifies the collection that owns the search servers that you want to start:
  esadmin startSearch –cid collection_id
Stop the search servers for a collection:
1. Log in as the default Watson Explorer Content Analytics administrator on any server.
2. Enter the following command, where collection_id identifies the collection that owns the search servers that you want to stop:
  esadmin stopSearch –cid collection_id