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Author's profile photo Andy Silvey

Solved – Behaviour in the OSS Notes Search

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Update Wednesday 23rd April 2014

With sincerest thanks on behalf of everybody who relies on OSS Notes,

Kristen Scheffler rose to this challenge, moved it forward and got the

issue resolved to the benefit of everybody.

Thank you Kristen, for such prompt, speedy, and successful action.

Problem Solved – Case Closed.

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Good Morning All,

until this behavioural discrepency is resolved, I’d like to share with the SAP Community a

top tip for searching the OSS for the latest OSS Notes on a particular subject.

Let’s keep this short, build the scenario, and get down to business. So, imagine, you’re involved

in a hot topic in your company, eg the Heartbleed security vulnerability.

You are tasked with getting the latest news from SAP on Heartbleed. You use your usual sources

for quality information from SAP, those are, the SCN SAP Community Network and the OSS

Operational Support System and SMP SAP Market Place.

You go onto the SMP and search the OSS Notes for Heartbleed. When the OSS Search returns the

results, you fine tune the results to have from the latest result and going in descending order, because

naturally you want the very latest information.

This is what you see if you do it today:

     OSS Search 104 Server.png

You notice the OSS Note is from the 9th of April.

And now, here’s the trick, here’s the thing.

Notice that the Url shows the 1xy server range on the SAP Market Place Servers.

If you replace the 1xy Server Range with 2xy, so, infact, just replace the 1 with a 2 in the Server Hostname

part of the Url and then perform the same search again and fine tuning for the very latest results in

descending order, this is what you will see today:

     SAP OSS Search 200 Server Range.png

Notice that the list of results starts from today. This behaviour is the same for any search, Hana, Kernel, Security

etc.

Obviously, this is an issue which needs to be resolved and I hereby report that issue.

In the meantime, until it is resolved, this blog shares the work around for anybody wishing to be confident

of finding the very latest OSS Notes on their subject of interest.

Best regards,

Andy.

p.s click on the images to see larger versions

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      6 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Kristen Scheffler
      Kristen Scheffler

      Hi Andy,

      Thanks for bringing this to our attention.  Have you logged an incident on this in the SAP Support Portal?  If so, would you mind direct messaging me the incident number?

      Many thanks,

      Kristen

      Author's profile photo Andy Silvey
      Andy Silvey
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Kristen,

      I've not created an incident for this, as it's not related to the systems where I work.

      I've noticed this for almost 6 months now.

      Once it is solved, I'll modify the blog content and remove the work-around.

      Best regards,

      Andy.

      Author's profile photo Kristen Scheffler
      Kristen Scheffler

      Hi Andy,

      We have our IT team working on this and results are showing improvement.  As soon as I have the 'all clear' I will update here.

      Thanks again for bringing to attention,

      Kristen

      Author's profile photo Kristen Scheffler
      Kristen Scheffler

      Hi Andy,

      Just received confirmation that the issue with search differences should now be resolved.  I just ran a test on 1xx and 2xx servers and received the same results on search.

      Could you check it out when you have a moment and let me know if it is addressed?

      Thanks!

      Kristen

      Author's profile photo Andy Silvey
      Andy Silvey
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Kristen,

      thank you for the feedback and speedy action which will benefit the whole SAP Customerbase.

      I have made the following tests, I put two browsers side by side, and prepared the search for the latest notes in descending order and with the detailed navigation minimised.

      I search for

      hana

      security

      kernel

      basis

      The result is a giant improvement on the previous situation, the 1xy servers are bringing the latest notes.

      Looking from the pedantic perspective, there are some anomolies, and the 1xy servers are not in every case tested showing the same results as the 2xy servers.

      The question is how pedantic to be ?

      On one side, this is a huge leap forward and many thanks to the team for that.

      But on the other side, were the OSS Notes Search a company's Business Warehouse or Reporting Tool, and some of the load balanced servers delivered different search results than other load balanced servers this situation wouldn't be acceptable to the business.

      As the OSS Notes Search is the definitive information source for SAP Customers for challenges with SAP products, I lean towards the side that the such results on either set of servers must be the same, or, this should be the long term goal.

      To wrap up, in the short term, what has been achieved is awesome, in the long term, the goal should be 100% same results from either set of servers..

      I will update the blog that the situation is as good as rectified.

      I've said it before and I say it again, this is the power of the SCN and used in the right way miracles can be achieved.

      Best regards and thank you very much for taking on this challenge and getting such a huge improvement in such a short period of time.

      Andy.

      Author's profile photo Matt Fraser
      Matt Fraser

      I hadn't noticed that before.  I see the same effect.  I often switch between the 1xx and 2xx servers, but mainly because whatever server I'm currently on will seem to go randomly down, and switching will get me back in business.  I hadn't noticed before that the actual content is different (a difference between 1 hit and 22 hits for the same search term is significant).

      What I had noticed before, though, is that searching the same terms on on the Notes Search tool and the xSearch tool (looking at the Notes hits) will sometimes return different hits, and thus I go back and forth between them, and also between searching for Notes on the SCN search tool (which I think mostly returns the same hits as xSearch, but in a better UI).  So, I would hazard a guess that this difference has the same cause, a breakdown in synchronization between the different load balanced servers.

      Thanks, Andy, for pointing this out!