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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?'
They already have it indexed for you.
You've stumped Slashdot. Bravo!
Ocean is land, covered with water.
Not that I've ever used it before, but it sounds like it does what you want: http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/gsa.html
MS does have a solution, it's called Windows Federated Search. Windows 7 with 2008R2 has it .. there might be a way to do with Windows Desktop Search 4.0. Here's some info on it - http://geekswithblogs.net/sdorman/archive/2009/05/14/windows-7-federated-search.aspx
Yes, Google's Search Appliance (GSA) could be used, I have seen it used with limited success. The main problem was how to respect access control on documents: either you index them or you don't, and if you index them with GSA, sensitive data may show up in search results. Also, we had a lot of trouble "taming" GSA: it would regularly take down servers that were dimensioned for light loads.
I would suggest using Alfresco http://www.alfresco.com/ as a CIFS (Common Internet File System) or WebDav store for all those documents. This would give you the simplicity of a shared folder and the opportunity to enrich the documents with searchable metadata such as tags, etc. Each folder (or any item, in fact) could have the correct access control that would be respected by the search engine, Lucene. http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/
Alfresco comes in both Enterprise and Community Edition, it's very easy to try out -- even our non-techie project manager could install it on his PC within 10 minutes. Try that with Documentum, FileNet or IBM DB2 Content Manager!
Who?
You are on /. and actually recommending an upgrade to Vista?
Brave man.
Have you ever actually used rsyng on a decent sized file set? Determining the changed file set requires significant disk activity.
It's a certain win when compared to just blindly transferring everything. But if you think that rsyncing 20 changed files in a 100 file working set is the same as rsyncing 20 changed files out of a 2,000,000 file working set you are very very wrong.
Completely aside from the absolute insanity of suggesting that you replicate the full contents of the fileserver to every desktop, which has been covered by others.
Building a better backup.
Zettabyte Storage