Re: querying over network (from SoC 2006)

["D Bera" <dbera web gmail com>]

> > 1) Start beagled with "--networked" on machine-A
>
> So one does this as one's own uid on the remote machine?  Presumably
> that beagled then indexes one's own ~ on the networked machine?  Into a
> ~/.beagle/ dir?

Yes. However, the remote query merely connects to the server at the
host:port and retrieves the results. At least thats what I made from
the tests. Alexis might have added authentication or some sort of
permission features - I dont know.

> What are the thoughts of a single beagled run as root that works on
> behalf of all of the users on that machine?  I'm thinking of a NASish
> type machine that hosts homedirs for example but does not really
> facilitate the users logging into it.  This same beagled should be
> configurable to index other locations on the machine for "public
> access".

If there is no authentication, it should be possible right now to run
beagled as root on the server machine. However, then any user would be
able to query for any file.

> The alternative of course is some form of "getent passwd | while read
> name; do su - name -c beagled --networked; done" but that starts a
> potentially large number of beagled processes.

Yeah. There is a problem in that approach.

> > 2) On machine-B, use "beagle-config networking AddNeighborhoodBeagleNode
> > hostname:portnumber" to add the machine-A (use portnumber = 4000)
>
> How about SD/rendezvous (or whatever it's being called these days) so
> that beagle automatically finds all of the networked beagleds on the
> network?

There was another SoC 2006 project (done by Kyle) which was
implementing this. It was a lot of GUI stuff (the gui had means to
finding out other beagle nodes in the network using avahi) -
unfortunately I dont run gnome so I have no plans to integrate his
code.

> > 3) On machine-B, run "beagle-query --local no --remote yes <search_terms>" to
> > search remote beagle.
>
> Is it intentional that the user has to know he is querying networked
> beagleds?  Ideally this whole networked concept is hidden from the user,
> yes?

the "--network yes" is more for testing and debugging. Its there so
that you can query a beagle on the local machine by 'local' query and
'network' query and compare results. The actual interface and default
values would depend on what users would feel comfortable with.

- dBera

--
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Debajyoti Bera @ http://dtecht.blogspot.com
beagle / KDE fan
Mandriva / Inspiron-1100 user