Verity Separate Server Install Collections Fail to Create

Verity sucks some days, and today is one of those days.

We had another episode with Verity where we had a collection disappear. I am not sure where or why, but I was tasked with getting it back online. This is not the first time this has happened, but the solution should be easy: Re-Create the Index, however this is where things got UGLY.

I looked in the CFadmin to see if the collection was listed, which it was not. So I proceeded to attempt to create it and received:

Unable to create collection companyX.
An error occurred while creating the collection: com.verity.api.administration.ConfigurationException: Index exists. Cannot insert entry. (-6065)

So it isn't listing the collection, and yet it says it exists?? OK, so that's problem one.

Problem 2 is that when i execute a 'reindex' which does a
<cfcollection action="create" ..>
I received no errors from the application (things looked like they were successful)

However when I look into CFADMIN again, in Verity Collections, the collection was once again not listed.

Here's what I did to fix it:

In our installation we have the Verity Installer (ColdFusion 7) installed on a separate box from the web server. I told the web1 to use the Verity K2Server at the web1 address, instead of the web2 address that it was using. Then I recreated and populated the collection using the same server the application was using (Verity was installed on both servers, but is typically not running on web1). Once done, I specified the web2 IP address again in cfadmin and copied the collection directory of the collection that I wanted from the web1 to web2.

When I go into cfadmin I should NOT see the collection listed - but after I executed a <cfcollection action="create"> with that collection name, something behind the scenes worked that time, and the collection showed up in cfadmin WITH the correct amount of data in it.

This is strange for a number of reasons, but I had to repeat this process for another collection just after this, so I know this process works. Executing a 'action="create"' typically kills any data that is in the collection, which didn't happen when I used this approach.

Anyway, hope this helps, and I know it will help me again the next time it happens....because it WILL!