This article applies to ShareBrowser v.4.2 and lower.
The ShareBrowser Indexer is the component of the EVO ShareBrowser system that "walks" the disk volumes and harvests metadata to be stored in the ShareBrowser Database. (Indexing a volume means reading the metadata (file size, name, comments, etc.) and placing that information into the ShareBrowser database.)
If you are about to configure your Indexer, or you've configured your Indexer but it's not doing what you expect, the following information may be helpful.
Single or multiple indexers
The Indexer component can be installed on one or more OS X systems (for example, to help spread the workload), and each Indexer can be configured to do different tasks. In most installations though, only one Indexer system will be needed. This article will assume a single Indexer configuration.
Mount the volumes before indexing
To do its job, an Indexer must be able to "see" all of the disks that you will want that Indexer to index. In other words, if you have NAS volumes, Xsan volumes, or USB disks, these volumes must be mounted before the Indexer starts its indexing operation. There is one exception: If you have a SANmp volume to be indexed, then SANmp credentials can be configured in the Indexer so that the Indexer can automatically mount the SANmp volume when necessary and unmount it when complete.
Scheduling, frequency, on demand
You configure your Indexer from ShareBrowser Admin — you'll see a list of volumes, and from the Admin application you can set the schedule and frequency for your Indexer or you can begin an on demand indexing operation by using the Start Indexing button. (The "Force Index" option will cause the indexer to index a volume for which there was no change in content since last index, for example, to collect additional metadata with different indexing parameters.)
What's added to the database
Once an indexing operation is run for a volume, the Indexer will add just the file names of all new files in that volume to the ShareBrowser Database; it will only add the file name itself. No other metadata is added to the database by the Indexer unless the "Harvest File Type and Size" checkbox is selected. Alternatively, you can tell the Indexer to get more information about your files, which can be done with the File Type Group...
The File Type Group function allows you to create groups of file types — by extensions — that should be "advance indexed," meaning, the Indexer will gather more metadata (extended metadata) than just the file name for files of the grouped types. (When manually entering extensions for your desired file types you can type in or omit the leading dot, either way is fine.) For example, you might create a group of image file types, and another group of video file types. Then, on one volume, you might set it to index all video types, while another volume may be set to index just the image types. The important thing to note here is that the Indexer will add the names of all files to the database, not just those in the File Type Group, but it will only get extended metadata for files in the File Type Group.
Pre-defined choices for File Type Group are "No Files" (get no extended metadata at all) and "All Files" (get extended metadata for all files). You can choose either method, but it is recommended that you define File Type Groups with types/extensions that work for your needs, striking the best balance between having a database that includes information you want while excluding superfluous metadata that would just get in the way and increase the size of the database.
Reboot after making changes
If you make changes to the Indexer settings, such as reconfiguring your File Type Group definitions or changing the "Harvest File Type and Size" option, you will need to reboot the Indexer computer for the changes to be effective.
Logging
The ShareBrowser logs can be viewed by choosing View Server Log under the Utilities menu in ShareBrowser Admin.