DougHughes.net

Verity Nightmare

Recently I’ve been having a nightmare of a problem with Verity on my laptop. Historically, it’s worked just fine. However, recently it more or less just stopped working. I’m sure I did something half-witted, but I don’t know what.

I have a client who’s not exactly been yelling at me to fix some bugs for him, but who is impatient to see some fixes put in place. Unfortunately, on Monday when I tried to duplicate some of his issues on his site, instead of seeing the issue, I saw an error from verity about a collection not existing.

That made perfect sense, I had just reinstalled ColdFusion. (I don’t remember why! Something in here might have been the half-witted problem.) So I log into the ColdFusion administrator and try to create the collection, but it failed with this error:

Unable to create collection Test.
Unable to create collection test.

An error occurred while creating the collection: com.verity.api.administration.ConfigurationException: Failed to retrieve style path. (-6044)

I spent two days Googling around looking for a solution to the problem. Unfortunately, all I found were a few references to the same instructions from Adobe. Namely, go into the verity directory for your ColdFusion or Jrun installation and run verity-uninstall.bat and then verity-install.bat.

Both of these files apparently returned errors, though I couldn’t find any information on those errors. (Sorry, I don’t have them documented.) In the end it didn’t solve my problem.

I screwed around a bit more until Tuesday afternoon when I decided to bite the bullet and call Adobe support. (This was a first for me.) Honestly, I’ve been a little under-whelmed with Adobe support. Compared to Microsoft support Adobe support is lame. They don’t immediately connect you with a support technician. Instead, they tell you that someone will call or email you within four hours. (Oh great, I get to wait by my computer and phone for four hours at the end of the day!)

Anyhow, I wasn’t initially impressed with the quality of service from the technician who contacted me. He asked a few cursory questions about the problem and then told me he’d call me back later. (Which he didn’t, he emailed me while I was away from the computer.) I think he figured he could look this issue up in their knowledge base (which I’d already scoured on the web) and be done with me.

The support ticket meandered through Wednesday without much contact and then into Thursday when I received no contact at all until after 2pm. I actually called the support line up and expressed my displeasure at their paid support. This seemed to give them a bit of a kick in the but, because I did get a call back from my tech and his support tech with some workable answers.

They wanted to try a manual installation of Verity to see if that would let verity work. It turned out that only one of verity’s three services were installed. So, maybe, we could manually run the commands to register the other services and we’d be in business. On the first run though it didn’t work. However, after modifying their instructions a bit I was able to get this to work:

1. Open a command prompt and go to your verity directory.
2. Go to the k2_nti40bin under your verity directory. (Note: I’m on windows. If you’re on *nix you may need to modify this path and the executable names below?)
3. Once in here run the rcadmin.exe file. This opens up what appears to be an administrative command prompt for verity.
4. Type hierarcyview and hit enter. In my case this listed only one service, the K2 Admin Service. This should list three services.
5. From here, I had to run a series of commands, shown below. These commands are “styleset”, “licenseupdate”, “trustedclientset”, “serverset”, “indexerset”, and “servicesignal”. Each of these works as a sort of wizard where you enter in a set of options. The correct values are shown after each command in the order you’re prompted. Where you see “(Just hit enter),” just hit enter. Here you go:
   

   styleset
   1
   Def_FileSystem
   1
   1
   (Just hit enter here)
   (Just hit enter here)
   filesys
   (Just hit enter here)
   default File System style files
   (Just hit enter here)
   y
   styleset
   1
   Def_FileSystem_PushAPI
   1
   1
   (Just hit enter here)
   (Just hit enter here)
   filesys
   (Just hit enter here)
   Default File System style files to be used with ODK Collection Indexing API
   (Just hit enter here)
   y
   styleset
   1
   ColdFusionK2
   1
   1
   (Just hit enter here)
   (Just hit enter here)
   filesys
   (Just hit enter here)
   ColdFusion K2 Style Files
   (Just hit enter here)
   y
   styleset
   1
   ColdFusionVspider
   1
   1
   (Just hit enter here)
   (Just hit enter here)
   filesys
   (Just hit enter here)
   ColdFusion Vspider Style Files
   (Just hit enter here)
   y
   licenseupdate
   ColdFusionK2
   trustedclientset
   ColdFusionK2
   a
   1
   127.0.0.1
   255.255.255.255
   y
   serverset
   1
   ColdFusionK2_server1
   9920
   ColdFusion K2Server
   y
   y
   y
   (Just hit enter here)
   ColdFusionK2
   C:JRun4verityk2common
   (Just hit enter here)
   200
   2
   n
   300000
   900000
   (Just hit enter here)
   (Just hit enter here)
   y
   trustedclientset
   ColdFusionK2_server1
   s
   1
   127.0.0.1
   255.255.255.255
   y
   servicesignal
   ColdFusionK2_server1
   1
   y
   indexerset
   1
   ColdFusionK2_indexserver1
   9960
   ColdFusion K2 Index Server
   (Just hit enter here)
   ColdFusionK2
   (Just hit enter here)
   4
   (Just hit enter here)
   1
   y
   trustedclientset
   ColdFusionK2_indexserver1
   i
   1
   127.0.0.1
   255.255.255.255
   y
   servicesignal
   ColdFusionK2_indexserver1
   1
   y

6. Once all these commands have been run you should have three services shown in the task manager, k2server, k2index, and k2admin. If you run the hierarchyview command again from rcadmin you should see three services listed. If you run an netstat an command from the command line you should see the ports 9950, 9920 and 9960 being listened on.

All in all, I’m the first person to report this issue to Adobe, so I’ll be surprised if anyone else ever needs this information, but here it is for the world.