Subject: Re: [netatalk-admins] Problems with sherlock searching netatalk
From: Rob Newberry (rob@eats.com)
Date: Wed Mar 17 1999 - 11:07:55 EST
> It's the third letter on this problem - but I've got the same. When
> Sherlock shows the list of items found, it says "The selected item
> could not be found" and so on. However, MacOS 8.1 with standard
> Find dialog works fine.
>
> read <http://til.info.apple.com/techinfo.nsf/artnum/n30845>. let's
> just say that find file use to work in the pre-sherlock days, so i'm
> not sure if it's actually netatalk's fault.
Adrian,
I'm pretty certain that I know why Sherlock doesn't work. I believe that
Sherlock index files for full text searches (and possibly how it tracks
"found" files) is done via file IDs. If you think about it, that makes
sense, because using file IDs would keep index files much smaller.
So far, sherlock seems to work on AppleShare IP and NT servers. BOTH of
these servers implement support for file IDs. Sherlock doesn't work on
Novell or netatalk -- neither of them support file IDs.
Now that you have file ID support available, turn it on and see if
Sherlock magically starts working. I'm pretty sure it will.
Note that this doesn't address a bigger issue about indexing netatalk
volumes. Suppose several people have access to the volume, but each one
has different permissions. Who gets to build the index? If user A builds
it, then only that stuff that user A has access to will be indexed. If
user B builds it, only the stuff that user B has access to will be
indexed. Not to mention what happens when user B's auto-index building
time is set to some time after user A's, it might just overwrites user A's
index. Now, obviously for individual user's "home" directories, this
won't be a problem -- supporting file IDs should allow them to index those
volumes right now. But for shared directories, it would be coolest to
have the server somehow index the volume itself. Unfortunately, this
requires knowlege of the format of those index files, which I don't
believe anyone except Apple possesses.
Rob
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Sat Dec 18 1999 - 16:16:27 EST