The Win2K Indexing Service

When you drill into the Directories folder within each index catalog, you can view the folders that the Indexing Service catalog includes and excludes. Adding entries to include or exclude folders in your Indexing Service catalog is as easy as right-clicking the Directories folder and selecting New, Directory. The dialog box that Figure 5 shows prompts you to navigate to the folder you want to include in the index catalog. From within this dialog box, you can choose

• the path or Uniform Naming Convention (UNC) path you want to include in the index catalog. If the directory you're adding is on a machine other than the local computer, you can type the UNC path to that computer. Use the format \\computername\sharename. The directory path that you type in the Path field is returned to the client, which executes a query on this directory.
• to include or exclude the content of the folder in the index catalog.
• the account that has permissions to perform an Indexing Service crawl on a file system located on a machine other than the local computer on which Indexing Service and the index catalog are running and built.

As Figure 5 shows, in my index catalog, I included a folder that exists on a different Microsoft Active Directory (AD) domain. I applied security credentials to the domain so that Indexing Service has sufficient permissions to crawl the remote file-system resource. After adding the directory to the index catalog, I performed a full rescan of the resource by right-clicking the directory and selecting All Tasks, Rescan (Full). However, by default, Indexing Service is configured to perform its work when the server is most available. To change the tuning parameters for Indexing Service, I first stopped the service by right-clicking Indexing Service in the Computer Management tool and selecting Stop. Then, I right-clicked Indexing Service and selected All Tasks, Tune Performance.

To force the new build of my Indexing Service catalog, I chose the Customize option in the dialog box that Figure 6 shows and clicked Customize. (Most likely, you won't want to force a new build in production scenarios because of the burden it places on your server.) I then changed the Indexing to Instant by dragging the slider all the way to the right. After clicking OK twice, I restarted Indexing Service. After a good hour, my server finally completed the build of the new Indexing Service catalog. I monitored the build closely through the Docs to Index and Total Docs columns of the Indexing Service snap-in and through the Indexing Service process (i.e., cisvc.exe and cidaemon.exe). At times, the cisvc.exe process consumed more than 80 percent of the CPU resource on the machine. When the Docs to Index and Total Docs columns reverted to zeros, the process was complete.

To test my custom Indexing Service catalog, I clicked the Query the Catalog link within the Web folder of the Indexing Service snap in. Figure 7 shows the HTML search form that appeared. I chose to search on the words platform sdk because that was the name of the folder on the remote server that I included in my Indexing Service catalog. After clicking Search, the first (most relevant) link that Indexing Service returned in the search was, in fact, a resource from the remote server.

Next Month
The Win2K Indexing Service is a powerful tool that you can use to quickly and easily provide a search utility for your intranet, extranet, or Internet applications. If you have history with earlier versions of Index Server, you'll notice that this search feature has dramatically improved since its predecessor in NT 4.0, which was little more than Office Fast Find on steroids.

Reader feedback generated the idea for this article. A few readers had expressed frustration at not being able to find information about Index Server. Searching the Web (or the Microsoft site) for Index Server will only produce frustration. You must search on Indexing Service. One great resource for Indexing Service is http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/psdk/indexsrv/indexingservicestartpage_6td1.htm.

Next month, I'll go into more advanced detail about Indexing Service. Also, I'll show you how to use custom search pages to create Web applications.

End of Article

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