How To Find Documents?

[Pete Randall]

Now that HP has pretty much trashed docs.hp.com, leaving broken links that are supposed to tell us how to find our favorite documents on the BSC (but actually just lead us to more broken links), just how are we really supposed to find them?

For example, can anyone tell me where http://www.docs.hp.com/en/5991-1236/When_Good_Disks_Go_Bad_WP.pdf can be found now?


Pete

[Hein van den Heuvel]

Hi Pete,

Yeah, annoying those renames for seemingly no good reason. Way too many dead-end street now.

>> For example, can anyone tell me where http://www.docs.hp.com/en/5991-1236/When_Good_Disks_Go_Bad_WP.pdf can be found now?

You ask a friend! Attached.
But that does not answer the main question nor solve the core problem.

Cheers,
Hein

[merieux]

Hi ,

I believe it's no more possible to keep old link and to find old reference via docs.hp.com . When you search document you have the reply : " Docs.hp.com custom search has been turned off" but no process explain ho to find another way to search.

Nevertheless you can the following doc
http://www.docs.hp.com/en/Locating-HPUX-Docs-on-BSC-Guide.pdf which can help you .

It's no more possible to download patch , no more way to easily find something .

I hope a new solution will be sson implemeted .


Regards ,

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Pete,

As an LVM doc, you should start here:

http://www.hp.com/go/hpux-LVM-VxVM-docs

It's at the bottom of the page...

Duncan

[Pete Randall]

Thanks, Hein.

Actually, I already have that particular doc saved.

I suppose I could have attached it to the question I was trying to answer this morning, but my normal method is to give the link so the questioner can bookmark it for their future reference.

So, my question if more rhetorical and the example I used was too specific, but the question of how one is supposed to find documents nowdays remains: How are you supposed to find any given document on BSC?


Pete

[Hakki Aydin Ucar]

Hi,
even though there is related topics in this address , still "When_Good_Disks_Go_Bad" address below is broken link ?

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c00872150&cc=us&dlc=en&lc=en&jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

may be it is taken out on purpose ? lots of address seem as broken link like you stated nowadays ?

[Pete Randall]

merieux, that's exactly what I'm saying. The old links don't work and half the links given in Locating-HPUX-Docs-on-BSC-Guide.pdf are broken.

Duncan, I would expect that you, if anyone, would have the answer, but how are the rest of us supposed to find stuff? And how am I to know that some genius at HP has classified that particular Doc LVM related? Why couldn't it have ended up in some hardware category?


Pete

[Torsten.]

Pete, see my thread

http://forums13.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1425824


The document you are looking for is here

http://bizsupport2.austin.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01911837/c01911837.pdf

[Pete Randall]

Hakki, that would be great if I was dealing with an Itanium system. What if I'm not? Down at the bottom of your link it references the When_Good_Disks_Go_Bad_WP.pdf link but, of course, the damn link is broken!!!!

My question still remains: How are supposed to find docs?


Pete

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

As Bill Hassell explained to me some in 2005, HP's internal search system is broken and probably will remain so.

They do however let google index the docs.hp.com site. So eventually, google's database will come up to date.

Typical Search:
When good disks go bad site:docs.hp.com

It may not work now, but unless HP has stopped them from indexing, it should at some point work.

SEP

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Pete,

I wish I had a better answer for you, but the truth is I don't - believe me I'm no happier about it than you are... all I can suggest is that you make your feelings known in the strongest possible terms to your HP rep...

Duncan

[Pete Randall]

Steve, thanks, but I've already tried that and it doesn't work and "eventually" doesn't do someone much good now.


Pete

[Duncan Edmonstone · Accepted solution]

Pete,

OK a little chink of light for you...

So I went to the main gateway to the BSC which is here:

http://www.hp.com/go/bizsupport

And then in the search field there did a search for "when good disks go bad"

At first glance it didn't return what I was looking for, but when I click on the first search item found which for some reason is entitled "Meet the HP Superdome servers", it does in fact turn out to be the whitepaper in question... the issue is that the title returned is just plain garbage... A little bit more playing indicates that the search facility does work reasonably well, but that I should not trust the document title to reflect whats there - more that I should read the first few lines of text under the title for a better guess at what I found...

It's still terrible, but at least something... I've raised this internally FWIW...

HTH

Duncan

[Hakki Aydin Ucar]

>Torsten: http://bizsupport2.austin.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01911837/c01911837.pdf

I just want to ask about Business Support Center has any index file to research a document ,when I try to put "When good disks go bad" in search window, lots of docs appeared as Duncan said.

But headlines have no word I m looking for, so I tried to search in BSC by click on " Search Business Support Forums" , forwarded me to the Japan site of HP ?

[Pete Randall]

Torsten, yes, I saw your other thread but "how am I supposed to find that?" or maybe I should ask "how did you find that?".

Hakki, start your own thread if you have questions.


Pete

[TwoProc]

What's really bad is that there are perfectly correct ways to handle document renaming. In a .htaccess file, you can use the redirectpermanent command to handle old/new file location corrections until all of the web sites redirects have been found and crawled through. I know that in HPs case it would add a lot to this file, but in that case it's meant to be handled progressively - fixing some files, making the redirect, putting in a crawler to find missing links, etc.

If it's whole virtual directories being moved , the old alias command in the web server works well too.

[Hakki Aydin Ucar]

>Pete: Hakki, start your own thread if you have questions.

What made you think like that ,but I do not have extra question ,just about to find something useful about your question in another address.

[Dennis Handly]

You can try google but include +bizsupport:
When_Good_Disks_Go_Bad HP site:hp.com + bizsupport
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/DocumentIndex.jsp?contentType=SupportManual〈=en&cc=us&docIndexId=64179&taskId=101&prodTypeId=18964&prodSeriesId=3367813

This morning I was trying to find a document using google and it still pointed at docs.hp.com, at the top! I'm surprised google doesn't notice the link is gone and find the real one. Though the cached copy was there.

>SEP: So eventually, google's database will come up to date.

How long? ;-)

>Down at the bottom of your link it references the When_Good_Disks_Go_Bad_WP.pdf link but, of course, the damn link is broken!

Unfortunately only the documents and "index" was moved, not the internal content of the documents.

>Duncan: all I can suggest is that you make your feelings known in the strongest possible terms to your HP rep.

I'll pass along this thread to my contacts. They did make the manpages clickable and add that document in Torsten's link.

>TwoProc: What's really bad is that there are perfectly correct ways to handle document renaming.

google was suppose to solve that problem. Along with a generic, "moved to BSC" message that gets you close.

[Pete Randall]

Dennis,

That helps. I always used "+site:itrc.hp.com" for google searches but was unsure what to use for BSC.


Pete

[Dennis Handly]

>I always used "+site:itrc.hp.com" for google searches but was unsure what to use for BSC.

That works fine for the ITRC but for docs, you used to use docs.hp.com and now you need more depth. It seems this works:
site:hp.com/bizsupport

Hmm, but that seems to only find the "index" pages, not the contents.

[Pete Randall]

Haaki: >
"What made you think like that ,but I do not have extra question ,just about to find something useful about your question in another address."

After considerable thought about this, I've decided to stick with my original opinion. When you arbitrarily decide to steer my thread in your own direction, you put me in the unwelcome position of having to assign points to not only your query, but any answers to it. I simply do not appreciate being put in such a postition.


Pete

[Steven E. Protter]

Clearly the way I used to do it when I had time to be a far more active ITRC member is not going to work.

All searches of docs.hp.com yield broken links.

I think basically, HP has relocated all the documents and not bothered to or able to update links in docs.hp.com

I did find searches of the BSC main site yielded documents that I was able to use to answer the other two questions I attempted to answer today.

I agree with Pete on thread hijacking and support his move to zero point it.

Another annoying characteristic I've seen lately in ITRC is the tendency to communicate with other thread participants with @ Scho Bagel or > So and so remarks.

I think that is a breach of etiquette and will not respond to such remarks, unless it adds values to the thread. Write to me all you want. If you want a conversation, post to a thread I wrote or use email. Hijacking other peoples threads to communicate with me will be a one sided conversation.

Since I do seem to have a few minutes to answer questions today, I will attempt to come up with a google or hp search option that correctly searches contents of documents.

When I find such a thing, I will post it here.

SEP

[Bill Hassell]

I'm sure the move to another entity's servers was well intentioned, but there are hundreds of thousands of unintended consequences. Google will soon be worthless unless bizsupport makes the contents available for Google indexing. There are hundreds of HP documents that refer to documents that are now broken links. The new HP search engine returns numerous documents that are at docs.hp.com which states that the link was moved and to try a link which points back to docs.hp.com -- a circular loop. And finally, all the thousands of answers to ITRC questions which refer to documents at docs.hp.com are now useless.

This move was not thought out very well all. Whether a document resides in Cupertino, Roseville, Austin and which managing entity is now responsible for hosting the content is completely unimportant to customers. Every existing link needs to refer to the new location and not a 404 error (aka, not here, try BSC).

[Maureen Rakel]

This document might be of help: http://bizsupport1.austin.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c02492449/c02492449.pdf

[Bill Hassell]

The bizsupport document is great if I am looking for something in the (very short) list. But I could not find anything about EFI or bootptab or fbackup. In other words, I can't search all the docs. I don't know which manuals have the EFI information so I have to search each one, one at a time.