What Desktop Search Engine For a Shared Volume?

kriston writes 'Searching data on a shared volume is tedious. If I try to use a Windows desktop search engine on a volume with hundreds of gigabytes the indexing process takes days and the search results are slow and unsatisfying. I'm thinking of an agent that runs on the server that regularly indexes and talks to the desktop machines running the search interface. How do you integrate your desktop search application with your remote file server without forcing each desktop to index the hundred gigabyte volume on its own?'

Comments

Google Jew Search

[Anonymous Coward]

Jew have too many files. Jews Joogle Jew Search.

Find Jews gas chambers before it's Jew late.

Re:Mirror it.

[palegray.net]

That's a completely difference scenario, and you know it. How about addressing the actual use case in question? He's talking about hundreds of gigabytes, not tens of terabytes. By the way, many organizations would have the "20 TB file server" so everyone can access the data, not necessarily exclusively via the share.

You also didn't specify how often the bulk of your data changes (I'm guessing the bulk of his share doesn't change every day, and yours probably doesn't either). Add in the fact that a 1 TB drive costs about $90 (you can do better if you shop around) and your objection to simply doing incremental updates for a few hundred gigs of data to a local mirror looks pretty ridiculous. It gets even more absurd when you consider how fast you can rsync a crapload of data over even a 100 Mbit connection, let along increasingly prevalent gigabit networks.

Why slam the server with complicated indexing schemes, coupled with multiple users competing for all the data on a potentially frequent basis? That sounds like a much bigger headache than just taking the simple route, unless business requirements specifically stipulate a minute-by-minute ability to run reports on the data in question. Given that the submitter is dealing with very time windows for processing reports in the first place, I don't get the impression that this is the case.

grep and locate

[gzipped_tar]

If you can't grep or locate, go fsck yourself ;)