administering directory exclusions for beagle

["Craig Silva" <Craig Silva abxlogistics com au>]

Dear beagle gurus,

we run SLED 10 and have multiple users logging into machines. We also have drives mapped across the WAN that are mounted in the users home directory and mounted via pam_mount because we have been reliant on AD for user authentication.

We are moving to utilising the novell linux client to mount drives however  I hate to say it but we mount the drives in the users home directory because it requires less thought on the users part to find the files they want than mounting elsewhere but this solution leads to problems with beagle.

The problem now becomes how to exclude these directories from beagle indexing and to do it in a way that is automated by the system so that the exclusion is incorporated into the beagle config for each new user without some manual intervention by the user or admin.. The problem is that when a new user logs into a SLED system, beagle attempts to index their home directory and subsequently attempts to index shared/mapped drives across our wan which of course have multiple gigs of data. Major bandwidth issue - the irony of course is that beagle doesn't break - it just attempts to index the files across the wan and does so quite successfully.

We tried putting a .beagle directory in /etc/skel with exclusions in the .beagle.conf file so that each new user would automatically get the exclusions but found that for some reason beagle or something else wiped out that file.

We could possibly script something but was wondering if someone else had come up with a solution for this?

We could of course simply remove beagle but I would like to avoid that as I would like to get to the point of configuring static indices for mapped drives and point web browsers at them or even better work out how to incorporate those static indices into each users beagle conf.

I'll do a summary of any ideas thrown this way.

Cheers

Craig



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Craig Silva, IT Manager, ABX Logistics (Aust.) P/L
9 Trade Park Dve. Tullamarine. Melbourne. vic. 3043 Australia
Tel: + 61 3 9 335 8250, Fax: +61 3 9 335 2714, Mob: 0408408748
Email: craig silva abxlogistics com au
Web: http://www.abxlogistics.com.au