[Samba] Windows search equivalent on Samba?

[Noel Power]

Hi
On 04/03/2019 22:38, Jeremy Allison wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 14, 2019 at 06:18:21PM +0100, Viktor Trojanovic via samba wrote:
>> In a pure Windows environment I'm helping manage, I recently had to set up
>> full text indexing on a file share. Since it's not possible to actually
>> index a file share from the client side, this has to be done on the server
>> itself and in case of Windows Server, this is done using the Windows Search
>> service. It's very easy to set up, too, just takes a few clicks.
>>
>> And Samba? A quick search on Google finds a Suse slide set from the 2015
>> SambaXP where this feature was discussed and certain development seems to
>> have happened but I couldn't find much after that, maybe someone here can
>> offer a current insight.
https://github.com/noelpower/samba/commits/WSP-WIP is where the code is
currently hosted. Please be aware that this is very very out of date. I
have recently (like last week) forward ported the code to master but I
haven't pushed it anywhere yet (due to lack of testing). I've also
forward ported to the server side to master but haven't done any testing
on that. Some changes in the samba code make me think I may need to make
more changes there to get it working.
>>
>> So, does Samba today support a full text index, either natively or using
>> third party tools, that's compatible with Windows Search?

So the WIP (work in progress) branch mentioned above does this, it is
compatible with windows search (but that compatibility is of course
limited), I aimed to try and basically match the or support the basic
search categories available from the explorer search ribbon in windows.
So for example simple searching for pictures, music, documents with or
without a text search term, it also supports some richer searches by
qualifying the searches with extra properties, so you could search for
documents by a particular Author etc. The limitations are in terms of
the properties that windows search allows you to use in the search
query, some of these are very windows specific or have no bearing in the
linux world or cannot be converted into something meaningful with the
indexing service that samba uses ([1] gnome-tracker in this case) The
server tries to do a best effort on the search.

I wonder what way are you using the Windows search, are you formulating
custom complex queries or just using simple searches in the explorer
search bar. I hope to get to test the forward ported to master server
soon and push a new version then. If you are  interested in doing some
experimentation I'd be happy to help you do that, if you wish you could
try the 'older' samba based version above (or you could wait till I push
the version based on new samba).  To enable tracker you need to follow
the instructions relating to tracker for spotlight
https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Spotlight (which also uses tracker)

You can find some details about the client (which gives an idea about
what the server supports) from
https://lists.samba.org/archive/samba-technical/2016-November/117312.html


>>  And can anyone
>> comment on what kind of performance disadvantage we're speaking about when
>> comparing full text on an indexed Windows file share and a non-indexed Samba
>> share?
I never quantified that, common sense would of
> Hi Noel, not sure if you're on the samba at lists.samba.org
> mailing list, or only on the samba-technical list (might
> be good to be on samba@ as well if not :-).
>
> Isn't this your code he's talking about here ?
>
> Cheers,
>
> 	Jeremy.
>
Noel


[1] currently gnome-tracker is being used for the windows search daemon
that I am working on, that may change in the future.