July 1, 2011 - 11:00, by Dostalek, Kevin
I recently began using a service called greplin which has changed the way I search for things in all my “life streams”. Since I did a few optimizations I wanted to give a quite review of the service and then also share with all my readers some tips that I think can make it work even better.
Before I get into greplin, use this link to access it: https://www.greplin.com/r/c/738522
That is somewhat of an “affiliate link”, though NO money is involved. It’s just my personal “refer a friend” link which earns both YOU and me “unlock credits” (as opposed to if you just go to http://greplin.com).
What is It?
Ok, so greplin basically lets you attach various data sources such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN, Dropbox, Gmail, Evernote, etc… and it builds a personal index of all of them for you (that only you can access of course). Then whenever you want to find something, you just search from their page (which pretty much looks like a blue version of google) and you get all of your results grouped by (and filterable by) result type (people, messages, streams, files, etc…) as well as data source. It has all the cool AJAXy enhancements too like immediate results as you type and result refiners (facets) to narrow your results.
When you get started, you just add in your data sources and it starts the indexing process. It seemed like wherever it was possible they used oAuth (or a variant, like Facebook connect), so they wouldn’t actually be storing your username/password, though I think there were a few where it might have. All my data sources were a snap to set up, though when I first added my Gmail account it seemed to hang up on indexing. I later figured out that this was just because I use my Gmail account to send canary emails to myself at my home-based email server every 5 minutes, and Gmail had stored all of these “sent items” – about 150k of them (ha!). After I deleted all of those (which only took about 2 minutes in Gmail) things were much better. I’m presently indexing Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, LinkedIN, and 2 Gmail accounts. It says it’s currently indexing 20336 documents for me (always changing of course).
Though I’m only using the “free” index data sources, they also have available other sources that are “unlockable” which you get for free once you invite enough people and earn “unlock credits”. Then there are “premium” data sources such as Google Apps, 37Signals Apps, Salesforce, Yammer, and Evernote that you need a paid account for (at the time of this writing it is $5/mo or $50/yr). That’s too bad about Evernote, because I do use it heavily, but I don’t know if I can justify $5/mo to search it when I can search it for free elsewhere.
A Few Tips
If you use Google Chrome as your browser, install the greplin extension. Not only does it add a little icon that lets you do quick searches, but it adds a shortcut in your address bar so that if you type g[space] (that is the g key followed by the spacebar) you can type your greplin search right in the address bar. For those of you that don’t know it, you can do the same thing for a google search by typing g[tab].
If you have multiple Gmail accounts this is the perfect solution for being able to search across them. After you add in your first Gmail data source just make sure you log out of Gmail completely in your browser so that when you go back to add the second (and third, etc…) it prompts you for another login instead of just connecting you to the one you’ve already added. Also make sure that your Gmail accounts have IMAP enabled, but that you aren’t using the quirky “Advanced IMAP Controls” Lab mode.
If you want to use this on your mobile device, they have done a pretty good job with autodetecting and redirecting a mobile version of the search/results page which is very nice. If you use an iPhone, while there is no App (yet), you can make your own by doing the following:
- Navigate to greplin.com – it will open in mobile mode.
- Scroll to the bottom and click the link to switch to standard view
- Pinch zoom all the way into the upper left corner so that all you see on the screen is the greplin logo (the cloud) centered or slightly below centered.
- Click the share button (bottom center) then choose “Add to Home Screen”
- Close browser. You should now see an app with the greplin logo on the Springboard. Click it (touch it?) greplin should open up in mobile mode again. If for some reason it isn’t, just scroll to the bottom and choose mobile version. It should stay in that mode from there forward.
Now you have a quick way of accessing your personal search engine from your iPhone! How cool is that?
August 18, 2009 - 15:28, by Dostalek, Kevin
I just recently had a bout with my MOSS search service. After a couple faithful years of service our SSP got a tick and so we decided the best thing to do was rebuild it (pretty easy really, only a few BDC apps to port, etc...) Unfortunately once everything was done we could not get the search service to crawl the "All Local Sites" content source. Here were the symptoms:
- Crawler Log indicated "Access Denied" when it tried to crawl the root of our intranet or mysites.
- Crawling of the sps:// people content source was fine.
- Content Access account had the proper policy (Read All), and actually even had rights to the site. You could log in as that user and browse all around the site from another computer.
- When a crawl was started (and thus ended very quickly with the one access denied log event) you could no longer open up the content source edit page in search administration (returned a .net "object not found" error).
- If you cleared all indexed content, then you could get back into the content source edit page, so long as you didn't actually attempt a crawl.
- Nothing else really significant in the windows logs (except a failure audit).
- Trying to navigate to the intranet root from the server with the content access account returned a 403 error <--- WHOA... BIG RED FLAG / HINT HERE.
So after searching around (sorry I'd link the blogs here, but the search was quite far and wide and I didn't properly keep track) I discovered that in Windows Server 2003 SP1 they introduced this new feature called "Loopback Check Security Feature". Essentially this means that any attempt by that machine to access an FQDN from the console (or apparently from services running on the box) will fail if it resolves back to itself. I presume the little scriptkiddie hack goes something like this: 1) trick an admin into installing your worm, 2) modify the hosts file or proxy settings so that some official site, say Paypal or your HR payrole system for example, gets redirected back to a local hacked up version of the site, 3) continue with man-in-middle attack, except without the middle man....
Anyway, you may be wonder why FQDN's were involved here since SharePoint by default pops in http://servername as the default "All Local Sites" content source. Well apparently we had changed the default access mapping for these sites a while back (typical) to their FQDN's. When we went to recreate the new SSP it just picked these up and used them.
SO-- the solution can be found at this KB article. Rather than turning off this loopback check (method 2) even though the scenario that it protects against seems pretty far fetched to me, I decided to use method 1, which worked great and didn't require a server reboot :) I've reproduced it below:
Method 1: Specify host names
Note We recommend that you use this method.
To specify the host names that are mapped to the loopback address and can connect to Web sites on your computer, follow these steps:
- Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
- In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\MSV1_0
- Right-click MSV1_0, point to New, and then click Multi-String Value.
- Type BackConnectionHostNames, and then press ENTER.
- Right-click BackConnectionHostNames, and then click Modify.
- In the Value data box, type the host name or the host names for the sites that are on the local computer, and then click OK.
- Quit Registry Editor, and then restart the IISAdmin service.
And that dear friends concludes this edition of "why is search not working...today (there is hope!)"
November 29, 2007 - 02:01, by Dostalek, Kevin
Very odd problem that I ran across and solved today. Here's the scenario:
MOSS search result pages were fine for full-blown administrator accouts (like mine), but for normal (non-elevated that is, many arn't actually "normal") the item icons would only display broken image links. Odd thing though is that if you pulled the SRC element from my page (the one with the working image), and navigated directly to it logged in as the normal user, it came up fine. Hence the problem was not with the icons themselves, but the page was actually rendering differently.
So after chasing down many paths I ended up in the 12\template\xml directory examining the docicon.xml file. Everything looked cool, but eventually after comparing it to other files in the same directory I noticed that it's NTFS security permissions were different. Rather than try and fix those, I just renamed the old file, created a new file in it's place and then copy & pasted the text (in notepad) into the new file. After a quick IISRESET all was well again.
Now in analyzing how that actually got jacked up, I compared a clean version of the file (from a dev server) with the one that wasn't working. The only difference was the addition of the PDF icon mapping. This was done correctly, but whoever did it (pretty sure I know who, but no need to mention names), must have done some strange or weird MOVING of the file (which in windows, if you are on the same volume retains the source file's permissions instead of inheriting the new parent's). Anyway, the lesson that should be learned here is that unless you really want to move a file (say because it's huge) on the same volume, just be in the habit of doing copies... they are safer.