Re: NFS Home drives and Static Indexes

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi,

On Tue, 2006-04-18 at 15:29 +0100, Phill Gillespie wrote:
> I'm looking to get Beagle set up to search inside my users' files. There 
> are two main places I need it to search, their home directories and two 
> shared folders. The computers are set-up as follows:
> * Shared Drives on computer A shared by Samba (other Windows users) in 
> the folder /samba
> * Home drives also on computer A shared by NFS to four machines
> * Four Thin Client servers which users log on to and get their desktop 
> via NFS
> 
> I can get Beagle running on computer A to index the two shared folders 
> and share that static index over the network.
>
> Any idea how I can get the home drives index on a per user basis and 
> index their emails?  If I do it via NFS the performance is awful and if 
> I do it on computer A I'd have to run 15 daemons and lose the email search.

There's no way right now to use beagle-build-index to build static
indexes of users' emails.  beagle-build-index only builds file-based
indexes.

You could do a hybrid solution, whereby the users' files are stored in a
static index using beagle-build-index, and have the users' emails
indexed by starting a beagle daemon on the thin client that only uses
the mail backend.  The performance will still suck, though, so it's not
an ideal solution.

> I am willing to listen to better ways to set up the home drives if 
> anyone has one...

Unfortunately I don't have any right now.  Reworking beagle-build-index
to handle things like emails would be a pretty big task that I myself
couldn't commit to.  It'd be a great project for someone to work on,
though, and incredibly helpful too.

Joe