Verity - Collections Taken Offline

In doing some more digging into what makes Verity tick (the stand alone version that can be installed separately from the ColdFusion application sever on a separate physical/virtual machine) I uncovered yet another clue into collections being taken 'offline' at various times. We have multiple collections registered through Verity for our clients, and almost monthly now we'll notice that one or more indexes just decides to stop responding to requests (and looks like it's disappeared as it's not listed in the cfadmin).

The directory and files to look at are here: \{verityroot}\verity\Data\host\admin.
Here you will find 2 files -
admin.dat - This file looks like it tells you the 'ID' of the adminX.xml file that its currently using as it's data store
adminX.xml - where X is the value from admin.dat file.

AdminX.xml is a file which has all configuration settings for the K2 Index engine, including names of collections, ports, paths, memory data etc.

You will also find an interesting area near the bottom of the file:

<CollRefs>
<CollRef alias="col1" status="online" threads="2"/>
<CollRef alias="col2" status="online" threads="3"/>
<CollRef alias="col3" status="offline" threads="3"/>

Here you may find your missing indexes - as they have been turned 'offline' for some reason (there is little logging going on to determine why an index get's taken offline).

This may help you in debugging, as next time this happens, I will be going straight to this file and turning any indexes back 'online' and noting any ones that are marked as offline.

To be continued....