[Archive-access-discuss] WARC Manipulation and manually creating WARCs: Need guidance

[Mat K. <mk...@cs...>]

Hello,
I have successfully installed an instance of Wayback and am able to
successfully add the file from
http://www.archive.org/download/ExampleArcAndWarcFiles/IAH-20080430204825-00000-blackbook.warc.gz
to my WARCs folder, see the listing appear and access the content of
the archive. I am investigating how to create WARCs from scratch (e.g.
without using Heretrix), so wanted to modify this WARC file and see
the changed reflected in my local Wayback instance after allowing some
time for re-indexing.

I have decompressed this WARC file:
gzip -d http://www.archive.org/download/ExampleArcAndWarcFiles/IAH-20080430204825-00000-blackbook.warc.gz

Truncated and/or made a subtle change to the file:
truncate -s 1500 IAH-20080430204825-00000-blackbook.warc

Re-gzipped the file:
gzip 1500 IAH-20080430204825-00000-blackbook.warc

again producing IAH-20080430204825-00000-blackbook.warc.gz in my Warc
directory but even after restarting Tomcat and the even the server,
the new file's contents never become accessible. When I click on the
date link supposedly associated with the modified WARC (I am guessing
it is this WARC and not a stale link from the old one), I am simply
told:

Resource Not Available.

My ultimate goal is to create a WARC file using a collection of
webpages and images that I have manually archived. Is there something
wrong with my procedure above that would prevent the truncated data
from showing up in Wayback? Does a resource exist that would allow me
to accomplish my ultimate goal of manually creating a WARC file from a
very small collection of data currently represented as files on a file
system? Any advice or direction provided would be very helpful.

Thank you,
Mat