Article ID: 270058 - Last Review: February 21, 2007 - Revision: 1.4

XADM: Using the Gthrlog.vbs Utility to View Gather Logs

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This article was previously published under Q270058

SUMMARY

This article explain how to use the Gthrlog.vbs utility to view information in Gather logs generated by Exchange Full-Text Indexing.

After populating an Exchange full-text index, you may notice errors in the application log, which state that some messages could not be indexed.

A Microsoft Search event is logged in the application log at the end of the indexing process. This event may look similar to the following log:

   Event Type:        Warning
   Event Source:      Microsoft Search
   Event Category:    Gatherer
   Event ID:          3035
   Date:              8/2/2000
   Time:              2:18:38 PM
   User:              N/A
   Computer:          Computer
   Description:

   One or more warnings or errors for Gatherer project
   (ExchangeServer_ServerName pub4AEACB43)were logged 
   to file C:\Program Files\ 
   Exchsrvr\ExchangeServer_ServerName\GatherLogs\pub4AEACB43.1.gthr).
   If you are interested in these messages, please, look at the file using
   the gatherer log query object (gthrlog.vbs, log viewer web page).

You can view which documents had problems in the Gather log file. Gather log files are created during every index process, and can be found in the Exchsrvr\ExchangeServer_(servername)\GatherLogs directory.

All files with the .gthr extension are text files that you can view to identify which documents and messages were not successfully indexed.

If you open a .gthr file with Microsoft Notepad, you may see something similar to this:

   676f5858     1bffcac         4000000f        0       0	
   67e8f013     1bffcac         40000017        0       0	
   560929f      1bffcae         4000001f        0       40d83
   1438f0c9     1bffcae         File:\\.\BackOfficeStorage\mydomain.com\Public Folders\MyFolder\PUB.zip
                                8000000c        0       8004120c
   583c89b8     1bffcae         File:\\.\BackOfficeStorage\mydomain.com\Public Folders\MyTestFolder\dir.eml 
                                8000000c        0       8004120c 
   596db638     1bffcae         40000020        0       40d83

From this information alone, you can see that there was a problem indexing a file called Pub.zip in MyFolder, and that a message called Dir.eml in MyTestFolder. You can see that information in the Gather log, but you do not know why the indexing of these files failed.

You can use the Gthrlog.vbs utility to extract more information from these logs. Gthrlog.vbs is located in the Program Files\Common Files\System\MSSEARCH\Bin directory. The syntax for this utility is:

Cscript Gthrlog.vbs (gather log filename)

This will display the information on screen. If you wish to have this information in a text format, you can run the utility with a redirector to a file, such as:

Cscript Gthrlog.vbs (gather log filename) > C:\ViewLog.txt

After running the Gthrlog.vbs utility against a .gthr file, you may see output similar to the following text:

   Microsoft (R) Windows Script Host Version 5.1 for Windows
   Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1996-1999. All rights reserved.

   8/2/2000 2:06:40 PM		Add	The gatherer has started
   8/2/2000 2:06:40 PM		Add	The initialization has completed
   8/2/2000 2:18:14 PM		Add	Started Full crawl
   8/2/2000 2:18:40 PM	

   File:\\.\BackOfficeStorage\mydomain.com\Public Folders\MyFolder\PUB.zip
   Add Error fetching URL, (8004120c - This file has reached the maximum download limit. 
   Make sure the full text of the document can be meaningfully indexed.)
   8/2/2000 2:20:34 PM	
   
   File:\\.\BackOfficeStorage\mydomain.com\Public Folders\MyTestFolder\dir.eml	
   Add Error fetching URL, (8004120c - This file has reached the maximum download limit. 
   Make sure the full text of the document can be meaningfully indexed.)
   8/2/2000 2:20:36 PM		Add	Completed Full crawl

From this output, you notice that the files in question were too big to index.

The Gthrlog.vbs utility helps you extract more information from the gather logs, which may possibly reveal why certain documents were not indexed properly.