Re: Beagle and NFS

["Kevin Kubasik" <kevin kubasik net>]

On 2/21/06, Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Tue, 2006-02-21 at 03:08 +0100, Fredrik Tolf wrote:
> > I'd like to ask if there are are any plans currently to make Beagle work
> > over NFS. As I understand it, as things stand right now, Beagle over NFS
> > is possible but not desirable, right? I've personally been really
> > interested in Beagle recently, but since I'm running NFS at home, it
> > hasn't really been on option.
>
> Beagle can crawl your NFS homedir, but as you said this is obviously
> suboptimal.  Your best bet is to create a server-side index using
> beagle-build-index as Kevin suggested.  Because NFS doesn't have inotify
> support, you won't be able to get live indexing either way, so doing
> things server-side is the best thing.
>
> Actually, thinking about this a little bit more, I wonder if someone
> could write a little standalone tool which queued up inotify changes on
> the server and triggered beagle-build-index to run again when a certain
> number change.  It'd be a neat hacking project for someone new to Beagle
> if they were so inclined.

When I get home, I have a rough (not quite working yet) python script
to listen to fam and update a simple text file with directory info, do
the beagle python bindings word that direction as well?

More importantly, can beagle-build-index be used to update a index
without a complete crawl? For example, I index
/mnt/home/kevin

my little script notices a change at
/mnt/home/kevin/src/beagle

can I get beagle-build-index to update the index w/o a complete
recrawl? Since beagle-build-index has no built in scheduling features,
thats a huge lock-up for the homedir if not.


> > I don't know if it helps, but I thought that it ought to be possible to
> > make Beagle work a bit like SGI's famd currently does over NFS, i.e.
> > having an instance of beagled running on the NFS server, and the locally
> > running instance of beagled relaying requests to it (famd uses Sun RPC
> > for this). Would this be a plausible way of making Beagle work over NFS?
>
> Doing networked searches generally would be a great thing to have.
> There are a bunch of different ways to go here:
>
>         1) Centralized fs notification daemon like FAM
>         2) Supporting file notification in the network filesystem
>         3) Adding an infrastructure for networked searching

I have to think that an implementation of 3 seems like the best idea,
we could cheat on handling automagic discovery and all that, and just
use a pipe over ssh for basic communication, and require that the user
do the key pairing atm. While a nice plan in the future would just
have each user of beagle establish a 'beagle username/passwd pair' and
coordinate distributed network searching, that doesn't seem to be in
the scope of the project at the moment.

I dunno, my thoughts, I'll fiddle with the script some more and see
what I can't figure out. ..

--Kevin Kubasik