Chapter 11. Full Text Searching - An Extension to Dnewsweb

Warning: This is a beta release of the Full Text Searching mechanism which was more than a little difficult to implement, it is still experimental at this time! We will be keen to hear how it performs in the 'real world' your feedback is always valuable.

Warning!!! To build a really complete index will require free space of about 10-50% the size of your spool area, it will also gobble up significant processor & memory resources. See the file fts.conf to control how

much of each item is actually indexed, and limit the list of groups that you send to the indexing service.

You can 'index' a subset of groups, possibly just your local news groups which are important to you, this will require very little resources.
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What to do:

1) In dnews.conf define the directory to use to build indexes, it must be a disk with lots of free space :-)

fts_dir c:/dnews/fts (NT)

fts_dir /var/spool/dnews/fts (Unix)

2) Create the directory and move or copy fts.conf into it.

(NT)

mkdir c:/dnews/fts

copy /dnews/fts.conf c:/dnews/fts

del /dnews/fts.conf (so you don't mix it up with the real one)

(UNIX)

mkdir /var/spool/dnews/fts

copy fts.conf /var/spool/dnews/fts

3) Install an xmit service to build the indexes:

(NT)

addsvc -del dfts

addsvc -add dfts xmit.exe "dfts ftsfeed -fts -at *5 *"

(UNIX)

nohup xmit ftsfeed -fts -at "*5" "*" &

(put that in a startup file)

4) Add an ftsfeed to newsfeeds.conf to send items to the xmit service. Select a list of groups that seem sensible to index, don't index the binary groups :-) (add this to the end of newsfeeds.conf)

site ftsfeed

groups !*,comp.*,rec.*,local.*

5) Install dnewsweb, and in dnewsweb.ini tell it that fts is enabled

search true

6) From Program Manager start the xmit fts service:

In Control Panel, Services, Start the DFTS Service

(UNIX) nohup xmit ftsfeed -fts -at "*5" "*" &

7) Wait for the indexes to start being created, if you have a small system you might want to send your current items into the database we DO NOT RECOMMEND using this command, it WILL lock up dnews for several minutes:

tellnews refeed ftsfeed (DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK)

8) Try the system out:

Notes:

1) New items will not appear immediately as DNEWS does not reload the database very often.

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