Google Developer Search Appliance – Proxmox Port

I recently came across a VM of Google's now defunct "Google Search Appliance" [1] specifically the "version for developers" that was discontinued abruptly in either 2008 or 2009 (sources conflict)

This appliance was designed by Google for enterprises to (essentially) run a Google Search Engine for their internal corporate intranets. Boasting the ability to index millions of pages. Under the hood these machines seemed to be re-badged Dell R710's in fancy bright yellow chassis with a copy of CentOS 5.x installed and some ability to phone home over a modem (??? DRM, I guess?)

Unfortunately the "developer version" was only ever distributed as a VMware image. Inside it contains a CentOS 5.0 image stripped down so aggressively it lacks even basic functions like "ls" internally. It's still able to index up to 50,000 pages and doesn't seem to have any kind of activation required or phone-home functionality embedded. So it still works (on sites that don't speak modern SSL, at least!)

I wanted to use this for a "Retro ISP" project currently in semi-closed-beta [2] but we're using Proxmox instead of VMware ESXi. So it needed some work to get it ported over to a "real" hypervisor!

After spending an afternoon fruitlessly trying to piece it back together with a full featured CentOS 5.0 install (or even just get it to accept a newer kernel) I ended up attaching a Debian 5.0 "sidecar" hard disk and modifying Debian's GRUB bootloader to point the kernel root to the GSA rootfs.

As a bonus this means the appliance now has access to virtio accelerated drivers for improved performance in Proxmox. Though it's still running a very old 2.6 era kernel and should not be used on production networks or the open internet!

Pictures of the GSA in action are also available on the Internet Archive listing for those that want to just see it running!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search_Appliance

[2] https://wiki.cursedsilicon.net/wiki/Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-...