Quickfinder Enabled on our Intranet

We have an internal Intranet (who doesn’t) that has been around for several years. It has all our hr, engineering discipline and social information on it. It was searchable wth HT:Dig, for a long time, but once when I was patching the server that did the searching a couple of months ago, it blew up and I wasn’t able to get it working again.

Last year, we had started to back up all our production networks over the wire to a big disk-server in one of our centralized locations. That data was made web-accessible to our network administrators using Novell NetStorage, so that they could do restores. We also have a CTO who wants to be able to search an production data in any office. We put two and two together, and set up Novell Quickfinder to automatically index the current backup, and present the results as NetStorage URLs. This gave our users the ability to search and access project data, but because of the way our eDirectory environment is configured, they could only actually retrieve data from projects in their own offices.

This week, I converted over our old HT:Dig search to use the new Quickfinder server for searching instead, on our Intranet content. I also reconfigured Quicfinder to present the search results as plain old apache URLs on it’s backup copy of the data, so that when you do a search and click a result, you get yesterday’s backed-up version. What this allows is for us to grant access to any eDirectory users to the project data by only modifying stuff in one instance of eDirectory, in the location where the backup sits.

Users can now search all our production data plus our Intranet content from one handy search page. Quickfinder is nice and fast too. The only issue we have with it is that it doesn’t index Autocad drawings, but virtually no web-search tools to that anyways.