Add on for Google Desktop: DNKA - remote desktop search tool.

Here is an interesting add on for Google Desktop Search:DNKA - remote desktop search tool.
The goal of this product is to serve up your google index and let people browse to your machine and search it. You have full control of what ip addresses you allow to search your machine and you can also change GDS from its default port of 4664. This could come in handy if you have a small office and you can't remember which machine you stored a document on. With this you could just browse over there and search. Yeah, there are security issues. I mean you wouldn't want to have GDS indexing all your stuff and then a co-worker be able to browse in and look at it. But, there are cases like at home or certain similar environments where it could come in handy.

It only took a few minutes to set up. The docs (what docs?) are scant but I was able to set it up on my desktop machine, connect in with my laptop and search my desktop machine. You have to use the server (my desktop in this example) machine's NIC ip address (obviously, 127.0.0.1 is local only) but on the laptop just browse to the ip of the desktop with it's ip address and port 4664 and you are good to go.

A suspicion I had was right, however. I mapped a drive to the desktop machine from my laptop, opened MS Word and saved a file to the mapped drive (Z: in this case). The new server configuration didn't pick up the file at all. Since I have GDS running on the laptop as well, I did a local search on it and the file was there instantly showing "Z:\myfile.doc" like you'd expect.

So, yeah, this is pretty cool with limitations. If you put it on a server, one thing you could do is write some script that whacked your Google index every night, slapped in the relevant reg keys and then re index. For a small business with few users that may be a good solution as long as the users knew it wasn't 'real time'. Kind of a Poor Man's Google Search Appliance.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 19, 2004 at 10:25 PM.  
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3 Comments:

  • Try www.x-friend.net. Similar concept to Google's Desktop Search but platform independent and it supports more formats. Also, it offers remote desktop/P2P capabilities already.

    By Axel, at 1:18 AM  

  • I came across a pretty interesting solution using Google Desktop Search in tandem with a software/service called FolderShare. When you are running the two programs on your computers you can search and access the files on all your computers via the web. It was blogged about here.

    By Anonymous, at 6:54 PM  

  • can someone please help me with this little program, I am so confused and don't know how to access it remotly!!

    post in the google blog here: http://groups-beta.google.com/group/Google-Desktop-Plugin-DNKA?hl=en

    By Anonymous, at 5:08 PM  

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