[Samba] Status of Windows Search Protocol support in Samba?

Mark Rousell mark.rousell at signal100.com
Fri Apr 17 15:55:20 UTC 2020


I've been trying to Google this but have not found any definitive
answers. Does Samba currently support Windows Search Protocol[1]?

I did find these lecture slides from a few years ago (five years?) but
they don't tell me about the current status:
https://sambaxp.org/archive_data/SambaXP2015-SLIDES/wed/track1/sambaxp2015-wed-track1-Noel_Power-WindowSearchProtocolAndSamba.pdf
(by Noel Power of SUSE).

If you're wondering what I'm talking about, here is a brief explanation:
The Windows Search tool on a Windows Vista/7/8/10/2008/2012/2016/2019
computer normally indexes and searches local files. However, it can also
query the Windows Search index on a remote
Vista/7/8/10/2008/2012/2016/2019 computer. Note that this is not
indexing the remote files: It is actually querying the remote index on
the remote computer. This remote query is done over via the Windows
Search Protocol using SMB as the transport.

I'd like to know if Samba supports this type of query.

I should point out that it would require the remote/server computer to
be running some kind of indexing tool and for Samba on that computer to
have the ability to query the indexing tool's index, but that is all
certainly feasible.

Clearly this would be useful in many scenarios but especially with
querying an index on a NAS.

(  As an aside, what I describe above should not be confused with so
called 'Federated Search' which commonly uses the OpenSearch[2]
protocol. That said, OpenSearch can be used to expose the content index
on a server to remote queries in a standardised way but it's not the
same as WSP above.  )



Footnotes:-
1: Windows Search Protocol:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/windows_protocols/ms-wsp/

2: OpenSearch: http://opensearch.org, redirects to
https://github.com/dewitt/opensearch

-- 
Mark Rousell
 
 
 



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