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Comment by asah | Hacker News Reader

Curious about open source licenses: this was a big problem for the Google search appliance IIRC

I spent tons of time with Google Search Appliance (at least 100 hours reverse-engineering it) it was just a CentOS machine with a daemon called Babysitter (which was just a loop restarting services), and a C++ binary called gws (Google Web Server).

Fun fact, if you ran gws without its config files you would see the real front end for Google Search, News, etc.

Web configuration interface was in Java, writing some XML templates if I remember well.

So taking all of that, besides a very boring OS there was "nothing" or very little amount of open-source they were using.

It was more all homemade (except the OS).

Fun fact: There was a secret hardcoded password in clear (but only for physical access).

EDIT: Password was different for each instance, not the same as I thought.

Well that's fun. I was the TL of the GSA platform team and you are mostly spot on. You are missing the whole crawling/indexing & security parts though. the GWS on the GSA was, tbh, one of the simplest component.

Each GSA had a set of unique BIOS/root password generated during bootstrap though.

I edited the message, sorry for that mistake, I had assumed it was the same everywhere.

It was great to see how it was engineered, some parts were truly remarkable, my main interest was to learn about the ranking algorithm (not for SEO purposes, but because I thought it was fun and interesting).

We would have been in love 15 years ago when there was the GSA, sadly, our paths have separated :D

https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1153&co...

How do you know to which libraries the c++ binary was statically linked to?

What was the problem specifically?

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