🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Dec23.013115.13255@adobe.com> ayers@adobe.com (Robert Ayers) writes:

   From: ayers@adobe.com (Robert Ayers)
   Date: Wed, 23 Dec 1992 01:31:15 GMT

   I'm working on a WAIS server that I expected to be used locally, that
   is used on the LAN at Adobe Systems.

   The server will index documents that are already stored within the 
   LAN-accessable NFS file system.

   It strikes me that, rather than having the WAIS-client ask the
   WAIS-server for the "hit" document's content (when the user says
   "View"), the client should ask for the full-path-name of the document
   and read the document itself (with NFS).  Why have the server NFS-read
   the whole document and re-send the bytes down the Z39.50 connection?

You may have already figured this out but...

You can get the filename out of the DOCID:  in the public server the docid
is just a string of "start-offset end-offset filename", so you could modify
a client to just get the file itself, but...

   Do you-all think tht this might be a valuable extension to the WAIS
   protocol?  

You can't depend on this.  For one, it's server specific.  The protocol
simply says that servers understand a docid that they produce.  In fact, on
the CM server the docid's are just indexes into a table on the server.  In
addition, there's no guarantee the files are local, or that the pathnames
are meaningful.  It's a hack you could do when you know the client and
server are on the same LAN, but you must know this for it to work...

And if the client and server are on teh same LAN, why not just do "local
searching".  The clients all have the search engine built-in, and retrieval
will be strictly a "local" operation.

(Local search is accomplished by leaving the :ip-name and :tcp-port fields
empty in the source description structure, and using the full path prefix
for the :database-name.)
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