LookSmart CEO Hits The Eject Button

Another rocky chapter in LookSmart’s history ended as Hills fled the company a day before they report their second quarter earnings.

That can’t be a good sign.

The company said chairman Edward West will take the president and CEO roles on an interim basis. LookSmart will focus on maintaining existing publisher relationships with search engine Ask.com, and with Wikia, the Jimmy Wales-backed venture that recently acquired distributed search project Grub from them.

Hills intends to start an online media advisory services business now that he has departed LookSmart. Australian IT said LookSmart disclosed this to Australia’s Securities Exchange.

LookSmart’s fortunes have waned ever since the end of the lofty dot-com bubble, and losing Microsoft and its deep pockets as a client. Hills came on board in 2004 to help the company get past that disastrous event, but LookSmart made little progress.

At the height of the dot-com boom, shares of LookSmart traded at $272.50. The stock closed most recently at $3.35.

In case you need a better understanding of Wales’ plans, he explains his motives:

“Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken,” Wales said back in December 2006, when Wikia launched Search Wikia effort. “Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency.”

Of course, Wales forgets to mention that Wikipedia wouldn’t have anywhere near the success if its content didn’t appear in the top 5 of Google for just about every generic keyword you can imagine. It also slipped his mind that he has a track record of not exactly giving back to those that helped make it a success – they’ll happily “assimilate” your web content, just don’t expect a link back in the process.

I wish Jimmy Wales the best of luck, but if he really wants to change the world, why not improve the non-profit Wikipedia? If his plans involve Wikia – which means he’s in this for the money – spare us the sanctimonious spin.

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Wikipedia Gets Grub

Wales isn’t throwing around the term “Google killer” or anything like that, however.  According to Eric Auchard, he stipulated that the change would take place “[i]f we can get good quality search results,” and went on to add, “I could be wrong about this, but it seems like a likely outcome.”

So what is it about Grub that spurred this statement?  As described by Neon Kelly, distributed computing is the key.  “Grub users download a program which makes uses of their computer’s processing power while the machine is left idle.  If widely adopted, such an arrangement could reduce the need for Wikia to set up a web crawling network of its own.”

Other details concerning Wikia’s acquisition of Grub remain unknown; there’s no telling what the purchase price was, in other words.  But Wikia has “released [Grub] under an open source license for the first time in four years,” according to a press release, so there shouldn’t be any secrets in that respect.

As for the balance of power – if anybody can challenge Google and its $160 billion market cap, Jimmy Wales has to be one of the leading candidates.

Unfortunately, the grub boot would start to load the SME kernel and then fail with a 0×10 message. This was an “E-Machine”, which was a choice I remember being unhappy about when it was first installed, but this customer is very price conscious and ignored my advice that better hardware would be smarter. Oh well.

As I had nothing better to do (yeah, right), I hopped in my car and drove down to RI to see this first hand. I should have looked up the error before getting in my car, but it was early and I hadn’t had enough coffee yet. If I HAD looked it up, I would have quickly found this (from http://linux.derkeiler.com/Newsgroups/comp.os.linux.setup/2003-08/0074.html):

0x00
"Internal error". This code is generated by the sector read routine of the
LILO boot loader whenever an internal inconsistency is detected. This might
be caused by corrupt files. Reinstall IPCop or recreate the boot media.

0xBB
"BIOS error". This shouldn't happen. Try booting again.

Well, I felt it had to be hardware, so that would have just confirmed it, and I did feel that it was going to be easier to track this down on-site than trying to work with the client over the phone. Providence isn’t very far away, so..

When I arrived on site, I just quickly confirmed that the symptoms were as told to me. Too many times I have have had someone tell me one thing and found something entirely different when on-site, but this time the error was accurately reported. Still lacking sufficient coffee, I sat down at a Windows machine and tried to call up Google.

Well, duh! The SME is the gateway to the internet! No gateway, no Internet, no Google. I shook my head in amazement and called Mitel support. In a very few minutes, I had one of the regular engineers on the phone. I explained that I would have looked this up myself if I had turned on my brain before getting in my car, and he laughed at me and did the search for me. In a few seconds, he told me it was most likely hardware.

I asked the customer for last night’s DVD (we run Microlite Edge for backup here) but it wouldn’t boot. That surprised me at the time, though later I found out why. I then asked for the boot recovery floppy we had created when the system was installed. That wouldn’t boot either, which was upsetting. Finally, I asked if he had a recent Desktop Backup – he said yes, but when we tried to find it on his Windows machines, there was none.

Oh boy. Just the way I wanted things to work out – no backups, hardware boot error. Good thing it’s only a 40 person office. Yes, I’m being sarcastic.

Fearing the worst, I inserted the SME install CD and rebooted. To me surprise, it saw the existing installation and offered to upgrade it. What the heck – I let it try, and it completed successfully. But the same 0×10 boot error came up. So, I booted that CD again, and this time when it got to the point of offering to upgrade, I did an ALT-F2 and had a shell prompt where I did a “cd /mnt/sysimage” and took a look around. All data was apparently intact, which meant that whatever hardware issue we had might be isolated to the boot files. I also now realized why the Edge DVD didn’t boot: this is a software raid system, which Edge can’t handle at the present time. We never told Edge to attempt a bootable backup because it can’t.

But knowing that it was RAID gave me hope. Examining /proc/mdstat showed me:

Personalities : [raid1]
read_ahead 1024 sectors
md2 : active raid1 hda3[1]
262016 blocks [2/1] [_U]

unused devices: <none>

The Mitel engineer explained that it should be showing [UU] for each line, and that the [_U] indicated a raid problem. At that point, I decided we should shut down the machine and open it up.

When we did that, I could immediately feel that the master ide drive was much hotter than the slave. The slave was warm, the master was uncomfortably hot. Touching the top of it with my finger made me feel I could blister my skin if I left it there long – it was that hot. I removed it, changed the jumper on the slave to make it the master, put the cable back, and buttoned the machine up. To my relief, it rebooted.

That’s not a guarantee with RAID. If the hardware problem had caused data corruption prior to failing completely, the corruption would have been mirrored to the slave. Fortunately that was not the case here.

So we were back up – short one hard drive, but up and running. I asked the Mitel engineer if I needed to reinstall blades because of the “upgrade”, but he explained that it wouldn’t overwrite newer files.

I then took a look at the Edge backup files – the backup had been failing for the past 10 days. I chastised the customer for not alerting me to that problem but I realize that he’s a busy guy and probably had other things on his mind. I left the system doing a Desktop Backup and advised the customer that they really should consider better hardware for such a critical system.

*Originally published at APLawrence.com

A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com