Copyright © 1994-2002 by Vestris Inc., Switzerland
| Table of Contents |
| 1. General Questions |
| Is alkaline just another perl search engine? Why was it ever written? |
| What does the Alkaline source code look like? Can I please get the source code of Alkaline? |
| What is the Cellular Expansion algorithm? Is there any documentation? |
| Can I use Alkaline to provide a search engine on files distributed on a CD-ROM? |
| I don't understand anything and I am bombarding Vestris with email. Nobody has answered any of my yesterday's 25 email messages. Why? |
| 2. Technical Questions |
| Can Alkaline index 50 million documents? |
| Is it possible to customize Alkaline's search results display format, look and feel? |
| I don't want to index in background constantly, how do I setup a crontab? |
| What is the right way of stopping Alkaline? Is it ok to stop Alkaline with a Ctrl-C, kill -SIGTERM or kill -9? |
| I am not sure how to run the daemon. Once I logoff the machine, the daemon stops, why and how can I avoid that? |
| How do I know when my siteidx.* files are corrupt? |
| What is the memory consumption of Alkaline? |
| Alkaline consumes 100% of CPU. What can I do to limit the aggressive resource consumption during indexing? |
| Can I and how do I run Alkaline as an NT Service? |
| How does the priority scheduling work under NT and how to I reduce Alkaline's priority under Windows NT? |
| Why do some pages seem not to be indexed? The link is still present in the siteidx?.url file! |
| How do I setup Apache to call Alkaline? |
| Does Alkaline work with virtual servers? |
| Why does Alkaline seem to grow in memory? |
| How much memory does Alkaline really use? I don't understand the output from top, ps or the columns in the Windows NT Task Manager. |
| When I run Alkaline it suddenly crashes with a Segmentation Fault or a Bus Error message. Then it dumps a core file. What is this? Can I delete the core file? |
| When I look at netstat output after running Alkaline for some time, why do ports get stuck in a CLOSE_WAIT or TIME_WAIT state? |
| Why do I get "unable to bind, address already in use" fatal error? |
| I am moving from an NT server to a Linux box. Can I copy Alkaline databases from one system to another? |
| When I am running Alkaline, ps or top show me more than one process, why and what are those processes doing? Do 4 processes of 10Mb mean that a total of 40Mb of memory is consumed? |
| How can I launch Alkaline each time my server restarts? |
| How many concurrent search requests (queries) does Alkaline support? |
| Does Alkaline work with proxies and firewalls? |
| Does Alkaline support refining results (searching from previous results)? |
| Do you provide an API to Alkaline so the product can be used in third party implementations? |
| Can multiple instances of Alkaline run on multiple ports with the same data files? |
| What is the right way to stop Alkaline? |
| My server is very loaded and Alkaline crashes every 24 hours. How can I improve server stability? |
| Apache logs are full of Alkaline's requests, can I avoid logging these? |
| Are there any security considerations for Alkaline? What is more secure, a CGI script or Alkaline? |
| Where is the admin section? I have problems navigating to the admin section? I get a password popup, a file not found, a blank page or a permission denied error. |
| 3. Indexing and Configuration |
| Is there any way to tell Alkaline to index a directory tree of files rather than using the crawler to just follow links? |
| What are all the file extensions Alkaline indexes? |
| How can I setup the search engine to be able to search multiple groups? Users should be able to select what part of my site they want to search. |
| How can I setup Alkaline to index multiple sites. Users should be able to select which site to search. |
| I have a site with 100 documents. Only 10 are being indexed. How can I find out why? |
| Alkaline has been running for quite some time, but no indexes have been written. Why? |
| ExcludeWords doesn't seem to work, when I search "with" which has been excluded by a dictionary I still get results. Why? |
| The stats say that 40 urls are reported and that 11 have been indexed, what about the other 29? |
| Can Alkaline index PDF documents? Results from PDF documents come as garbage binary data starting with %PDF-1.2, why? |
| Error (52338) couldn't execute 'gzip -d -q \s87.Z when using pdf2text. |
| Error (0): pdf file is damaged - attempting to reconstruct xref table... when using pdf2text. |
| When reindexing, I see [url][verified] output and it takes a lot of time, what is it and can I avoid it? |
| I have found nothing about .asp files in the documentation about filters. Can Alkaline index .asp files? |
| The online management shows the asearch.cnf contents, but they are different since I have changed the asearch.cnf. Why? |
| 4. Templates and Search Results |
| How can I have multiple templates without loading the same index multiple times? |
| How do I get a copy of the searched text inside my search box once search operation results show. |
| How can I update the template search page without restarting Alkaline? |
| How can I keep the case-sensitive box checked in Alkaline results? |
| How can I implement a Hide Summaries option? |
| Does Alkaline support banner ad display based on keyword searches? |
| Does Alkaline support other languages than English? Does Alkaline index Unicode or DBCS documents? Can I get a localized version of Alkaline? |
| The date shown by $date is wrong, what is the difference between $date and $modif? |
| My urls are entered through a set of checkboxes on the search form. When the results template is displayed, those urls get displayed. How can I avoid that? |
| Can I return an .asp file instead of a simple html page filled with search results? |
| How does Alkaline rank results? Is it possible to configure and modify the ranking? |
| I have file names with spaces. When Alkaline outputs results, they contain a space and the link is wrong. How can I urlencode these? |
| I have really long urls. When a page doesn't have a title, that really long url is output. How can I cut the title to N characters at most? |
| I would like to have a .php template or a dynamic cgi-bin program generate a template. Does Alkaline support cgi? |
| How do I enable search terms highlighting within results? |
| 5. Searching |
| Is there a way to initiate a search from within a Perl script and get the results back within the same Perl script to be formatted and displayed? |
| Is there a way to search for a range of values. For example, if there is a date field within a set of files, can I search for all the files dated between 7/1/99 and 7/26/99? |
| I would like to hide the port value when accessing Alkaline and search from http://search.server.com. How can I use the Apache proxy mechanism? |
| How can I integrate Alkaline search in a php website? |
| How can I integrate Alkaline search in a Cold Fusion cfm website? |
| I would like to access the search engine via https://. Does Alkaline support SSL? Can the Apache proxy mechanism be configured to filter requests and forward them to Alkaline? |
| I often get a Sever Busy error or an unresponsive Alkaline. How does the -mt (maximum search threads) command line parameter change this? What are the DoS mechanisms in Alkaline? |
| 6. Certification, Registration and License |
| I have problems with certification. What is a nag? Where do I get the certification key from? |
| How do I request a certificate? A step by step tutorial. |
| We are an internet provider and are offering our customers the possibility to search their sites, how many licenses should we purchase? |
| My server ip address has changed. I have moved the search engine to a new machine. Do I need to purchase a new license and should I request an unlock key again? |
| Does Vestris provide any special reseller deals, multiple licenses purchase options, source code licenses, etc? |
| I have entered the certification unlock key successfully. The nag was removed. When I restart Alkaline or reboot my server, the nag appears again. Why? |
| I have purchased an Alkaline license. When I go to the certification request page, it asks me for a certificate. Should I install Alkaline first or can I get the certificate beforehand? |