NAME
glimpseserver - a server version of the glimpse searching package.
OVERVIEW
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 warn-
ing about security below.
SYNOPSIS
glimpseserver [ -H dir -K port -J host. ]
DESCRIPTION
-H dir
specifies the directory of the index. Similar to the -H option of
glimpse. The default directory is the home 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.
RESTARTING
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.
WARNING
Glimpseserver should be used only for public servers. Any client that
knows the port number can get any information available in the index (and
AUTHORS
Udi Manber and Burra Gopal, Department of Computer Science, University of
Arizona, and Sun Wu, the National Chung-Cheng University, Taiwan. (Email:
glimpse@cs.arizona.edu)