The Soulpass Project

So ODU recently purchased a shiny new Google Search Appliance. We’re talking $10,000 worth of web-searching power. It came in a box with the Google logo on the site. Most rack server machines look the same — plain black rectagles in a shape that could probably be used as a food tray. If you look through the racks in the ODU server room you won’t see much variance in the mounted machines.

In comes the Google Mini. Needless to say, its shade of cerulean blue really sticks out in the racks. When you first fire it up it takes about 10 minutes to boot. Once it’s booted you interface it with a laptop using a crossover cable (it comes with some cables). We used my work laptop to set it up. I got to type in the configuration settings for it, but unfortunately I had to pass the computer to David when it came time to set the password
The Google Appliance will soon replace the current Google Custom Search the site is using. Having an in-house search appliance will exponentially increase the flexibility, alowing us to tightly integrate current databases such as those for faculty directories, courses and calenders. The possibilities are endless. The operating system internals of the Google Mini are locked down pretty tightly; they still don’t want people finding out how their actual search algorithms work or what kind of database system they are using.

I took some pictures of the installation process and will probably post them at some point.

It came with a Google T-Shirt! At the next Web Group meeting they’re going to announce who gets it. *crosses fingers*

This entry was posted on Friday, March 23rd, 2007 at 12:45 am and is filed under Database. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.