glimpseserver - a server version of the glimpse searching package.
Glimpse is an indexing and query system that allows you to search through
all your files very quickly. The use of glimpse in servers that handle
frequent queries is growing, which is why we wrote glimpseserver to make
searches more efficient. Glimpseserver starts a process that listens to
queries, runs glimpse, and sends the answers back. The main advantage is that
the index is read only once into memory saving a lot of IO. Glimpse
communicates with glimpseserver through a given port number. See the warning
about security below.
glimpseserver [
-H dir -K port -J
host . ]
- -H dir
- specifies the directory of the index. Similar to the -H
option of glimpse. The default directory is the value of the environment
variable $HOME if that is set, otherwise it is the current directory.
- -K port
- this is the TCP port for communication: glimpseserver waits
for requests on this port and clients that want to search using the index
in specified by the -H option must use this port (by calling glimpse -K).
The defaults port number is 2001.
- -J host
- the name of the host. The default is the host where
glimpseserver is running, which is probably the only possibility
anyway.
If a new index is created by running glimpseindex every night, restarting a new
glimpseserver is now easier: simply send a SIGUSR2 (signal #31 - i.e.,
"kill -31 pid") to glimpseserver; it then re-reads the NEW index and
is ready to serve requests again. (A SIGHUP, i.e., signal #1, can also be sent
instead of SIGUSR2 to make the glimpseserver re-read the new index.) The
recommended way to do a fresh indexing while the server is still running is:
send SIGSTOP to glimpseserver
do the indexing
send SIGUSR2 to glimpseserver
send SIGCONT to glimpseserver (to ask it to continue after stop)
The SIGSTOP is required so that glimpseserver doesn't answer any queries while
the indexing is going on.
Glimpseserver should be used only for public servers. Any client that knows the
port number can get any information available in the index (and port numbers
are not that secret). When glimpse is run as a standalone application it
requires read permission of the index and all the files. When glimpse uses the
-C option to communicate with glimpseserver, glimpse (the client) does not
require any permission, because glimpseserver does all the searching. So, we
recommend not to run glimpseserver on any data that should be protected.
Glimpseserver is meant to be used for public data.
glimpse(1),
glimpseindex(1),
Please submit bug reports or comments at
http://webglimpse.net/bugzilla/
Udi Manber and Burra Gopal, Department of Computer Science, University of
Arizona, and Sun Wu, the National Chung-Cheng University, Taiwan. Now
maintained by Golda Velez at Internet WorkShop (Email:
[email protected])