We would like to allow win7 users to search a win08 R2 file server's remote index. I get to a point where each user needs a unique library file on there machine in order to search remote network shares that have indexes.

 

Anyone have experience doing this and how did you setup/deploy. This doesn't seem to scale very well.

 

Also, would be nice to setup Win7 desktop search to include this in it's default search. I don't see an easy way to setup network shares/with index's into the default win7 search.

Hi,

 

First of all: pay attention

Second: pay more attention

 

I used WS4 for a period of time... and these are (for me) the most important consideration:

1) WS4 works quite well, IF and only IF your index is up to date, you can find quite everything.

2) WS4 doesn't work well, the main problem is the update of the index: when you do it, is time AND PERFOMANCE consuming. The point is that you COULD use cached indexes, but... they are sooo sloooow. You can search your file manually which is better :)

 

Anyway, I used WS4 on a file server (NTFS) which had more than 100'000 files, but it was running on a storage system which was really perfomant.

 

Returning to your question...

 

You should follow these steps:

1) Create the index on your server.

2) select a GROUP of users (not more than 10), and start the deploy of WS4

3) start perfomance monitor (logging mode) not every second... and run it for a week.

4) check what happened on your server, if there's no impact on perfomances, continue with the deploy (but still with maximum 10 users).

 

Everything depends on HOW MANY files do you have and the I/O of yours Hard drives.

 

Here's a (useful?) link:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc772446(WS.10).aspx

 

It's quite short so... read it carefully.

 

Regarding your last question: I think that the only way is to add the desired path to the index service...