Thunderstone Search Appliance Manual

Network Shares

    Use this interface to mount remote file server(s) to the Parametric Search Appliance so that it may be indexed into one or more walk profiles.

All created mounts are permanent until manually removed. They will be remounted upon reboot of the Parametric Search Appliance.

To mount a remote filesystem or share select the type from the drop-down list and click Add.

Once a filesystem is mounted, it may be referenced in crawls (e.g. for Base URL(s)) with the URL syntax:

file://host/share/

with an optional subdirectory appended. Make sure the host used is exactly the same as specified in the Network Shares mount.

NFS filesystems - Unix/Linux/etc. servers

Server:

Enter the hostname of the server. CaSe does not matter. (e.g.: nas1.mycompany.com)

Directory:

Enter the full path of the directory to mount as it is exported from the server. (e.g.: /documents/internal)

Reliability:

Select Hard or Soft. Hard will cause the Parametric Search Appliance to keep retrying the same file forever in the event of an error reaching the server. Soft will allow files to fail if the NFS server can not be reached.

NFS Version:

The highest NFS version to use. Leave this at 3 unless you have problems with old NFS servers.

CIFS - Windows 2000+

Server:

Enter the hostname of the server. CaSe does not matter. (e.g.: nas1.mycompany.com)

Share:

Enter the name of the share as exported by the server. (e.g.: internal)

Login Name:

Enter the login name for the account to use to access the files on this share. This should be a user that has permission to read all the files that need to be indexed.

Login Password:

Enter the password for the selected login name.

Server IP:

Rarely used. If the "Name" of the computer is different than its DNS name it may reject mount requests to the "wrong" name. In that case enter whatever name makes the server happy into the Server field and enter the machine's IP address into this field.

NOTE:

When using Windows 2003 server you may need to change a setting on the server to allow mounting from the Parametric Search Appliance. If the share won't mount try setting control panel → admin tools → domain security policy → security settings → local policy → security options → Microsoft network server: Digitally sign communications (always) to disabled.

SMB - Windows The SMB - Windows mount is an older system, which has been replaced by CIFS - Windows 2000+. If your file server doesn't support CIFS or if you're having problems with CIFS, you can try using SMB instead, which takes the same options as CIFS.

Current mount list

Under the Add form is the list of currently mounts and their status. Each mount has a Remove link to unmount the filesystem and/or remove it from the list. The options for each mount may be clicked to examine or modify the options and remount the filesystem.

If an entry shows as "unmounted" there is a problem with the settings and it is not able to be mounted as is. If it was a transient problem with the server click the options then click "Save changes" without making any changes to retry the mount.

Under the options for each mount is also an example of the minimum Base URL you would enter into a profile to index the files on that filesystem.

The Technical Info link shows some internal details about the mounts that may be helpful to tech support if you have problems.

Note: This feature appeared in scripts version 5.4.11. Prior to that Webmin was the only way to manage remote mounts.