John Croson's Blog Home

Well, after my short test of Windows Search, I've come to this conclusion; Not ready for prime-time. My expectation was that it Should Just Work (tm). I really think they tried to come up with a good search tool, but this doesn't come close to the polished utility I expected. It seems to have issues with resetting to default index locations periodically, not providing an uninstallation method, rebooting without an option to delay it when installing, etc. etc. Just check the forums here: http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=127&SiteID=1 I'm moving on to have a look at Locate32.net, an application not unlike updatedb in the unix world. I should have stuck with this one to begin with, since I AM a Linux snob.

I'm keeping a close eye on the status of Windows Search on my Windows 2003 Server. The SAN shares out hundreds of gb of data, but I only need to index about 100gb... :-0 When I initially installed the new Windows Service, it occurred to me that I could roll it out to all the users, and let them index what they wanted...rrriiiiiight. I read an article that indicated when WS4 is installed, it automatically adds mapped locations to the index. WOW, that would be tons of network traffic, even if the service does throttle it back to minimize network impact. I found it to be a better implementation to install it on the server, wait for the index to complete, then roll it out to the users, and control the index locations via GPO, keeping them off the network. Unfortunately, the index database has grown to 25gb, and shows no signs of stopping. Good thing I decided to home the database on a volume with enough room... I'll post back when the indexing process completes. In a day or two...

I'd written an article a couple of months ago about leveraging Microsoft Indexing Services in the enterprise to facilitate searching network shares and publishing an ASP interface to an intranet for your users. My environment consists of a Windows 2003 Standard server providing the Indexing Services, a second AD / ASP / MS SQL 2k Windows 2003 Standard server with attached SAN and numerous network shares holding nearly 1tb in size, indexed by the Indexing Server. The Indexing Server also hosts the ASP pages for user searches. I've found out several things lately about Indexing Services, and would like to take a moment to point out some basic principle's of this technology: It's not necessary for the windows workstations to have Indexing Services enabled to enjoy a speedy network file search experience. In fact, many people will recommend that this service be turned off and disabled on workstations, since it can slow performance. To give Windows Desktop Search (WDS) th...