| Tech news at TheJemReport.com |
Software reviews at SoftwareinReview.com |
Hardware reviews at HardwareinReview.com |
Discuss technology at TJRForum.com |
November 22, 2005MastheadPublisher: Capitoline Media Editor in Chief: Jem Matzan Executive Editor: Suzanne Sacks Webmaster: Woody Gilk Moderators: Dallas Smith, Roger Trewinnard, Michelle West, Woody Gilk, Joe Fenton, Jawad Niazi Writers: Dallas Smith, Michelle West, Woody Gilk, Joe Fenton, Jawad Niazi, Ben Leach, Sergio Magdaleno, Joe Cavaliere November 11, 2005Nine tools every technician should haveTo the computer technician or sysadmin in charge of hardware diagnosis and repair, a properly equipped toolbox is of paramount importance. Not having the right tool for the job can turn a 15-minute task into an all-day ordeal. In no specific order, here are nine not-so-obvious tools that should be in your tech toolbox. The hook toolEver drop a screw into a machine where you can’t get to it with your hand? You could use a magnetized screwdriver to get it out, but what if it’s wedged somewhere, or underneath a board? That’s where the hook tool comes in. Also handy for (and originally designed for) installing/removing tension springs in laptop computers, the hook tool replaced an array of dental picks that I had. Dust OffGood old air-in-a-can. Useful for blowing the dust out of PCI/AGP/ISA slots, drive connectors, ATX sockets, fans, heatsinks, optical drives, and the computer chassis as a whole. You could use a vacuum cleaner instead (and for extreme cases, you should start with a vacuum cleaner and finish with Dust Off), but Dust Off tends to get a more powerful blast into smaller places. The pry toolIf you remember one thing in your career as a hardware technician, it should be this: never add or remove components while the power is connected. If you remember two things, remember this as well: never pry plastic parts with metal. If you do, you’ll chip the hell out of the plastic, and whatever you are working on will be cosmetically ruined. I keep two tools around to pry apart plastic pieces (like laptop computer cases that snap together): one is an old 30-pin SIMM memory module, and the other is a plastic pry tool kit. Despite using softer materials to pry, you still have to be gentle and think your way through a disassembly rather than use brute force. Power supply testerYou could lug around a spare power supply for testing, but you can get a higher degree of accuracy and reliability from the Antec ATX12V power supply tester that I recently reviewed. Not only does it show if the PSU is good or bad, but it also shows which specific rail is failing. It’s small, inexpensive, easy to use, and reliable. Knoppix CDNo matter what operating system you use, when troubleshooting a computer the first thing that you should do is isolate the problem. Is it hardware or software at fault? The best way to make that determination is to use a known-good operating system installation. If you have one installed on a spare hard drive or partition, fine. If not, get Knoppix and put it on a CD. If Knoppix boots and runs perfectly, you can be more confident that your computer trouble is software-related. If there are big problems with Knoppix (and you know the hardware is supported, which it almost always is), it’s a safe bet that you have faulty hardware. Anti-static bagsEvery electronic computer part you buy comes enclosed in an anti-static bag. Some are clear plastic, others are made of a silvery substance called Mylar. Either will do for storage and transport of electronic components. You could buy some, but if you’ve purchased a lot of computer parts over the years, your in-house stock of anti-static bags should be sufficient. Why do you need these? Because if you have to transport a computer part from one place to another, the only way to ensure that it will not be electrically damaged during its journey is to protect it with anti-static material. Bag it up, seal the bag, and be gentle with it. Heatsink compoundEvery time you remove a heatsink from an integrated circuit (like a CPU or GPU, for instance), you have to clean off all of the old heatsink compound and apply a new coat. The best way to do this is to get some shop towels (the heavy blue paper towels you find in auto parts stores) and some rubbing alcohol, and use them to get all of the old material off of both the heatsink and the chip. Obviously you would not pour the alcohol onto the chip — just dab some on a folded paper towel and work with that. Once it’s all gone, apply a thin, even coat of new heatsink compound. Do not use too much. If you find yourself thinking, “Gosh, that might not be enough, I should put more on it,” then stop, put the heatsink compound away, and put the heatsink back on. Even if it looks like too little, remember that there is only a tiny little invisible space between the heatsink and the chip; this is what the compound is meant to fill. When you put too much on, it oozes out of the side of the heatsink and can wreck the chip, the board, or the whole computer. The white compound that comes with most CPU heatsink/fan units (and many other things) will work fine. You don’t need the fancy silver stuff, no matter what the reviews say. Yes, it could lower the temperature of the chip by a couple of degrees, but for the silent non-overclocker majority, silver compound is unnecessary. The price difference between the two is not all that great, so you may want to go ahead and get the silver stuff anyway — it’s up to you. Ultimately it doesn’t matter which one you use, as long as you use it properly. Anti-static glovesNo serious technician wears an anti-static strap (unless, of course, company policy demands it). By maintaining a constant awareness of static electricity, you can properly handle any computer component safely. However, it makes life a lot easier when you use anti-static gloves. Not only can you be certain that you will not transfer a deadly static charge to an electronic component, but you’ll also save your hands from the cuts and scrapes that you inevitably get from working inside of a computer. The link above goes to a 12-pair package, which is more or less a lifetime supply. You can find single pairs of Hyflex anti-static gloves if you search Froogle. Remember to get the right size — I’m a size 9, myself. Extra cords and cablesI personally have a few Molex-to-SATA power cable converters, a DVI to VGA adapter, a 20-to-24-pin (and vice-versa) ATX power connector adapter, a laptop-to-standard IDE converter (this allows you to connect a laptop hard drive to a desktop computer — very handy), an extra power cord, two SATA data cables, and two 24″ 80-wire IDE data cables in my toolbox. I really ought to have a 36″ IDE cable in there in case of emergency. You never know when you’re going to need one of these adapters, cords or cables. When you do need one, though, having an extra is a real life-saver. The obvious stuffThen there are the bread-and-butter tools of your technician’s toolbox: good Phillips head, flat head, and torx head screwdriver sets in a variety of sizes; needlenose pliers; a flashlight; two-part epoxy; superglue; headphones or earbuds (for testing audio output); a couple of writable CDs; a USB flash drive; and a partitioned screw case. No matter what you have in your toolbox, the greatest tool that any technician has is his brain. Only experience and a dedication to solving problems will make a great technician. A properly stocked toolbox helps, of course, but if your brain is not properly engaged, all of the tools in the world won’t be able to help you fix things. Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum. Copyright 2005 Jem Matzan.
Power supply supportThe Antec ATX12V tester will work with any 20- or 24-pin ATX power supply. It won’t work with AT power supplies (or any other non-ATX PSUs) at all. Click here for a picture of the Antec ATX12V power supply tester in action. Physical designThe device has only one socket for power supply input, which is where the main motherboard power connector goes. Through this socket, all of the different power rails are tested; there is no need to test Molex (hard drive/CDROM/floppy) connectors because they come off of the same +5v and +12v rails that the motherboard gets. Of course this also means that the Antec ATX12V power supply tester cannot verify the integrity of all of the wires and connectors — only the power output from the main ATX connector. So if you have a bad Molex connector or drive power cable, this tool will not find it. There are two rubber grips on either side of the unit, making it easy to hold onto while you’re inserting and removing power cables. Five 3-color LEDs show through the top of the tester, providing the test results for each rail. All green lights means that the PSU is good; red lights mean that a voltage reading is too high; orange means that the rail is too low. Each rail has its own LED indicator, so you can see which rail in specific is failing. Two “idiot” LEDs are below the rail LED array, showing a large green light when all of the rails test good, a red light when there is a failure, and both red and green when the PSU is borderline. A handy extra on the bottom of the Antec ATX12V tester is a connector block for multimeter leads. Using a multimeter, you can individually test the +3.3v, +5v, and +12v rails to see their exact output. SummaryI’ve seen other PSU testers in my day, most of them crudely designed. The Antec ATX12V power supply tester is the first one I’ve seen that is professionally designed. It has all the features you could ask for in a PSU tester — individual rail indicators, a power good indicator, support for both 20- and 24-pin ATX PSUs, and a connector block for multimeter leads. It’s a welcome addition to my tool box, and eliminates the need for an extra power supply for testing (a solution that takes much more time and provides much less accuracy). Every computer technician — and anyone else who regularly has to troubleshoot computer hardware — should have one of these. Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.
Copyright 2005 Jem Matzan.
|
If you’ve never used FreeBSD before, this section’s for you. If you’re already familiar with FreeBSD, you’ll probably want to skip down to the next section to find out what’s new.
Originally developed from the Unix-based Berkeley Software Distribution, FreeBSD is among the oldest extant Unix derivatives. It is currently maintained and improved by a large team of programmers, and supported monetarily by individual and corporate donors.
From FreeBSD you can generally expect a modern Unix-like operating system heavily armed with network services and tools. It is relatively easy to install, configure, and administer FreeBSD on servers or desktop machines. FreeBSD is scalable up to at least 12 CPUs (this is as many parallel CPUs as it has been officially tested with), which includes SMP support for Hyper-Threading and multiple cores.
Aside from the programs included in the base system, FreeBSD offers extra software via pre-compiled binary packages; and a Ports system, which functions much like a less automatic version of Gentoo’s Portage software management framework. From Ports you can automatically download, compile, and install more than 13,000 programs. There are few applications in the free software canon that are not available in the FreeBSD Ports tree. There is also an available Linux binary compatibility layer which is efficient enough to say that there is no noticeable performance difference between Linux binaries and FreeBSD binaries running on the same system.
Some of the FreeBSD userland programs are used in Darwin, which is the operating system that forms the basis for Apple’s OS X. However, the OS X kernel is based on Mach, not FreeBSD, so OS X is not “based on” or “developed from” FreeBSD in the traditional sense (such as the way OpenBSD was forked from NetBSD in 1995).
The majority of the FreeBSD base system is licensed under the free software BSD license, although some included programs are governed by the GNU GPL and similar free software licenses.
To begin with, several security vulnerabilities were fixed in 6.0. Documentation for kernel options and userland programs was also updated. Manual pages now have a more standard look, and are more accurate and thorough.
Kernel enhancements in 6.0 are numerous, but most of the changes seem to be bugfixes and new or enhanced hardware drivers.
One of the cool new enhancements in FreeBSD 6.0 is the ability to rename network interfaces at boot time through rc.conf. If you have multiple interfaces, or programs like VMware that demand a certain network device name in order to bind its services to it, this is a very handy feature.
Lastly, the FreeBSD installation disc structure has changed. There is still a BOOTONLY disc that is designed for FTP installations, but disc 1 and 2 of the complete set are now rearranged. Disc 1 now contains the installation utility, base distributions, and a live filesystem that can be booted to in case your standard installation becomes unbootable. Disc 2, which used to contain the live filesystem, now contains some of the most popular and important FreeBSD packages.
The 4BSD process scheduler is still the default. SCHED_ULE was supposed to have been fixed by now; I didn’t test it thoroughly because I couldn’t get FreeBSD to work on enough of my test machines. Also, in contrast to most of the 5.x releases, you have to recompile the kernel to get SMP support.
FreeBSD 6.0/i386 worked perfectly on a computer built around an Intel D915GUXL motherboard, so I was, for the first time in several releases, able to give it a good stress test on a somewhat modern machine. The 3.2Ghz CPU that I used has Hyper-Threading Technology, which means that operating systems generally treat it like it has two discrete processors. This very same system used to cause FreeBSD to crash like crazy when I had HTT enabled, but no matter what I did to FreeBSD 6.0, it refused to crash or cause any other errors. I compiled GNOME from Ports on one virtual terminal, another program in another terminal, and built the userland with four parallel makes (make buildworld -j4) at the same time, and there were no problems.
I noticed that ACPI support has been greatly improved. When I touched any of the buttons on the front of my machine, FreeBSD was aware of it. Previously, FreeBSD was almost totally ignorant of ACPI events, and often crashed due to incomplete or sloppy ACPI support.
As always, there was no trouble getting network services started ala Apache and Postfix. I didn’t test any other services. MySQL 5.0 installed cleanly and appeared to work as expected, but I didn’t hit it with any really intense tests. Desktop functionality was the same as it has been in previous releases — you have to do much of the configuration on your own, but you can build a perfectly usable desktop system from FreeBSD. KDE 3.4 and GNOME 2.10 are the desktop environments of choice, but XFCE and a wide array of window managers are also available — pretty much everything you’d get with Debian or Gentoo.
The AMD64 edition didn’t work well on two systems. Since it has a long and inglorious history of severe stability problems that appear to have carried over into 6.0, I would strongly recommend using the i386 edition of FreeBSD instead of the AMD64 edition. Alternatively you could make the leap to OpenBSD or GNU/Linux, which have more reliable 64-bit AMD64/EM64T builds.
Specifically FreeBSD 6.0/AMD64 had severe difficulty with a Sun Java Workstation 2100z — the system repeatedly kernel panicked and crashed with vinvalbuf and g_vfs_done errors under light load. There were also problems on a system based on an Asus A8N-E motherboard: the Nvidia network driver (new to FreeBSD 6.0) gave random, repeated device timeout errors (this problem also occurred on the i386 edition). The device timeout error would either slow the system to a crawl for long periods of time, or kill the network connection entirely. This occurred at random times while the network was not even in use.
The i386 edition of FreeBSD killed the connection to the USB keyboard on the Sun Java Workstation just before it got to the sysinstall menu. The keyboard worked fine up until that point. In previous releases when this happened, I could unplug and replug the keyboard and it would work again. That trick no longer works with FreeBSD 6.0.
My Atheros-based (Linux- and OpenBSD-compatible) wireless card was not immediately recognized by FreeBSD 6.0/AMD64, but I didn’t have the opportunity to find out why — the system kept kernel panicking.
The rearranged installation disc structure was all screwed up during my testing. I selected about two dozen packages for installation, and sysinstall responded by asking me to switch discs more than 20 times. I ended up rebooting and reinstalling without any packages (packages are also available via FTP, but all of the mirrors I tried at the time had not yet downloaded the package tree, so only the slow main server was available).
While FreeBSD 6.0 is a vast improvement over the disaster that was the 5.x series, it is still horrible when it comes to supporting “new” hardware. I’m sure FreeBSD works perfectly on any computer from the Pentium 4 socket 478 era all the way back to the original Pentium 60 chip, but it seems to have a great deal of trouble managing any technologies introduced in the past year or so.
FreeBSD 6.0 seems to be stable enough on SMP machines that FreeBSD 4.x stragglers should be able to upgrade without any trouble — if your machine works on FreeBSD 4.x, it will probably work just as well on this new release. Just don’t expect a lot of new machines (or more specifically, machines that use new technologies) to be fully supported in FreeBSD 6.0.
Hopefully FreeBSD 6.1 will support more of my test machines and I’ll be able to do some serious performance benchmarking to see what kind of behind-the-scenes work has been done in the new 6.x series.
Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.
| Purpose | Operating system |
| Manufacturer | The FreeBSD project |
| Architectures | x86, AMD64/EM64T, SPARC64, PC98, Alpha, PPC, IA64 |
| License | BSD, although some parts of the base system are under the GPL or other free software licenses |
| Market | Web, email, and other network services servers; also useful as a desktop OS |
| Price (retail) | Free to download, or $40 for a CD set |
| Previous version | FreeBSD 5.4 |
| Product website | Click here |
Copyright 2005 Jem Matzan.
|
|
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
|
This section is for those new to CrossOver Office. If you already know what CXO is and want to find out what’s new in version 5, skip down to the next section.
CodeWeavers’ CrossOver Office (CXO for short) is a software framework that emulates the Microsoft Windows 98 and 2000 application programming interfaces (APIs) on GNU/Linux. This allows Windows programs to run on GNU/Linux without having to run a virtual instance of the operating system ala a virtual machine like Win4Lin or VMware. It was originally designed to bring Microsoft Office and Intuit Quicken to GNU/Linux, but many more programs have been tested and are known to work with CXO to some degree.
Not all Windows programs will run perfectly — some won’t even run at all, although most of them will at least install properly. Want to find out if your must-have application works with CrossOver? Check out their compatibility list, and keep in mind that not all of these programs have been updated to reflect changes made in version 5.0, as most entries rely on user and volunteer feedback for CodeWeavers’ rating system. Check the forums for each application to see what actual users are saying about compatibility with version 5.0.
CrossOver Office is available in two editions: Standard and Professional. The two are essentially the same, except Professional has multi-user support and special deployability functions. Professional is designed for businesses, Standard for home users. There is also a CrossOver Office Server Edition, which allows CrossOver Office to run on thin clients.
CrossOver Office is based on the free software WINE API emulator, and adds only commercial support and proprietary installation tools to help with configuration. So in essence, CXO is no more capable than recent builds of WINE, but it does have a number of extras that add value through convenience. Despite its basis in free software, CrossOver Office is governed by a proprietary license that prohibits sharing.
The following improvements have been made to CXO since version 4.2:
Usually with new releases of CXO, there are slight, unremarkable changes, bugfixes, and other behind-the scenes work that make things a little better in a number of small ways. With version 5.0, the whole CXO package has improved by a significant margin. Programs that wouldn’t even install before can now work to a reasonable degree of competency. Programs that almost worked before are now doing rather well. Although there are still only about a dozen Windows applications that have achieved the highest compatibility status — gold medal — with CodeWeavers, user feedback on the individual program sites in the CXO compatibility section suggests that many programs are ready to be promoted.
The big change in the CXO installation utility is the Bottle Manager. Bottles are separate instances of WINE; you use them to segregate installed programs from one another so that they don’t accidentally interfere with each other. This prevents a new program from wrecking already installed programs that work well with the current configuration. The downside is, programs are completely isolated to their bottle, so if you have several programs that require Internet Explorer, you’ll have to install Internet Explorer separately in every bottle. It’s easier to use one bottle, which is what CXO did in previous versions, but this approach may cause trouble with some applications. In the Professional edition, bottles can be packaged into RPMs and deployed to other systems that have CrossOver Office installed, making deployment of Windows programs much easier. Doing this with proprietary programs may violate their licenses, however.
Click here for a screen shot of WordPerfect 12 in CrossOver Office 5.0.
Installation was as simple as running a shell script, which is retrieved from the CodeWeavers download server upon purchase. I was pleased to see that GNOME integration has greatly improved. Where version 4.2 refused to install the proper desktop icons and menu entries, 5.0 installed new program icons in all of the right places in GNOME 2.10.2 on Gentoo/AMD64.
My traditional test for CrossOver Office is Corel WordPerfect Office 12, which has had several different problems with CXO in the past. With version 5.0, some remain (such as the “enhanced” file dialogue bug, and the reluctance of the program to start more than once per X.org session), but overall I found WordPerfect to be stable and usable — or at least moreso than before.
I also tested with the Muppet Treasure Island DVD game. I had trouble installing it, but after manually installing Indeo Video for Windows, the game would work somewhat, whereas in CrossOver Office 4.2 it wouldn’t work at all. If I tinker with it for another hour or so I could probably get it to work better.
The CXO installer has an annoying bug that greys out the Next button whenever you put the CXO window in the background. When you click back into the CXO installation program, you have to click Back, then Next. I couldn’t find any other bona-fide bugs in CrossOver Office 5.0, but I think it should be noted that the compatibility database is badly in need of a global update. There are many user reviews that assign various status markers to programs that are still listed as “untested” in the database. It’s best to pay attention to the user comments in the forum above and beyond the CodeWeavers ratings.
I came across a bug in X.org version 6.8.2-r4 that blacked out all of the icons in Windows programs installed through CXO. This is a bug in X.org, not CrossOver Office, and is fixed by upgrading to version 6.8.2-r6 or higher.
To get a better perspective on CrossOver Office, CodeWeavers, and the state of the market, I emailed some interview questions to Jon Parshall, Chief Operating Officer of CodeWeavers, Inc.
How much participation and help does CodeWeavers see from Windows software companies like Adobe, Macromedia, Microsoft, and others? Macromedia announced last year that it would help the WINE project where it concerned Macromedia programs. Have you seen any evidence of this?
Jon Parshall: Well, from Microsoft (obviously) we get no help at all, which isn’t surprising. Wine is very high on the list of technologies they’d like to see killed off. Companies like Macromedia, Adobe, and Intuit all have good relations with us, but I would characterize their help as being of an informal nature. We’re friends, and they occasionally provide us with copies of their software, as well as occasional technical assistance. But there’s nothing there of a really formal, systemic, or monetary nature.
What’s the future of the CrossOver Office installation tools? This release saw the addition of the Bottle Manager; what’s the next step in the evolution of bottles?
JP: That’s a really good question. As you’re aware, we have a rather interesting business model, in that we support free software and the Wine Project by giving back our enhancements to Wine. At the same time, though, we are always looking for ways that we can differentiate ourselves from free Wine. Features like bottles are one way that we can provide some value-add over free Wine — something that will appeal to system administrators and other “power users.” I think you’ll continue to see more features like this. And we’ll certainly build on the concept of bottles — make them more manageable and configurable — because the notion of portable, encapsulated Wine environments is a powerful one.
How likely is it that someday all Windows programs will work perfectly through CrossOver Office?
JP: Well, I think the word “perfectly” is dangerous — after all, many Windows programs don’t work perfectly even under Windows. Do all your old Win95 apps run perfectly under XP? No. Will they under Vista? No. So I think it’s important to note that even native Windows apps have problems with backwards compatibility across the various releases of the OS. That’s already a problem for a lot of IT environments, in that that’s what helps drive the relentless software/hardware upgrade cycle that drives many IT managers bananas. And that’s not going to change.
At the same time, it’s clear that Wine is still a long way away even from the level of native Windows, in whatever version you care to mention. That being said, we feel that Wine 0.9 represents a very significant step forward in Wine as a technology. It’s architecturally complete now. We just need to do a lot more hard work on the individual components.
I think the answer to your question really hinges on the effort level behind Wine. Right now, the Wine community and CodeWeavers comprise a relatively small group of developers. And while we’ve managed to achieve a minor technological miracle with that limited resource pool, we could continue advancing that miracle a whole lot quicker if there were more developers and more money behind the effort. With proper backing, I’m convinced that Wine can move itself from being a niche technology–something that works brilliantly in some cases, but poorly in others–and towards a technology that 1) people perceive as being widely and generally useful, and 2) is relatively easily fixable from a development standpoint. Not perfect. But broadly accepted and easier to improve. That’s the goal.
What an improvement! CrossOver Office 5.0 could, for some people, invalidate the need for expensive Windows virtual machines for running desktop software on GNU/Linux. The superiority of version 5.0 is due both to the substantial improvements in WINE and in the enhancements in the CXO tools themselves.
Microsoft Office 2003 compatibility is still not where it should be, even though much progress has been made in improving support for it. While Word and Excel are reported to work, Outlook 2003 is reported to be unusable in CrossOver Office. Outlook is arguably the most important part of the MS Office suite; not having it is a dealbreaker for many people. Still, MS Office XP, 2000, and 97 all have higher certifications, so if Microsoft Office is a must-have, some version of it will work well.
Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.
| Purpose | Migration tool/API emulator |
| Manufacturer | CodeWeavers |
| Architectures | x86 |
| License | Proprietary; the core is governed by the GNU General Public License |
| Market | Home, small business, and enterprise users migrating to GNU/Linux |
| Price (retail) | U.S. $40 for Standard, $70 for Professional |
| Previous version | CrossOver Office 4.2 |
| Product website | Click here |
Copyright 2005 Jem Matzan.
|
|
|
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
|
dtSearch is composed of several different parts: dtSearch Desktop, CD Wizard, Indexer, and dtSearch Web.
The Indexer creates indexes for dtSearch. You select which drives or directories you want to include in the index, then create or update it. You can maintain several different indexes, if necessary. Indexing is a fairly slow process — even on a fast machine — because it is disk-intensive, and the hard drive is the slowest part of the computing equation. For businesses serious about using dtSearch on a single server (as opposed to a cluster), I highly recommend a dedicated RAID 0+1 or RAID 5 array for safe and efficient storage of the index. Each index will be large — nearly the size of the data being indexed. I created a test index of a 4.4GB portion of my /home directory and came out with a 3.3GB index. Indexes are limited to 1TB in size, but a program included with the dtSearch suite can create a meta index out of several indexes, thereby eliminating the 1TB limit.
Click here for a screen shot of dtSearch Indexer
Once you have an index, the other tools in the suite can be used. To search a shared or local machine’s index, you’d use dtSearch Desktop. It’s a standalone application that uses a variety of search methods to crawl through a selected index: fuzzy, phonic, natural language, boolean logic, and proximity. dtSearch Desktop will search through nearly any kind of file: HTML, XML, TXT, PDF, Word DOC, Excel XLS, PowerPoint PPT, WordPerfect WPD, RTF, ZIP, and email MBOX files. It’ll even find readable text strings in binary files.
Click here for a screen shot of dtSearch Desktop
The CD Wizard creates searchable indexes for backup CDs and DVDs. On each disc is an index and a self-contained search tool that resembles a Web browser. From there you can search the contents of the disc to see what’s on it. The CD Wizard doesn’t write directly to discs or create ISO images — all it does is provide a directory structure and search mechanism for the disc project. So to write the CD, you’d start your preferred CD writing application and start a new data project. Then you’d select the data and directory structure from the folder you created with the CD Wizard, and write the CD. When the CD is finished, you can put it into any Windows-based computer and it’ll autorun the dtSearch engine interface to navigate the CD’s contents.
Click here for a screen shot of CD Wizard
dtSearch Web is a Web-based search tool that converts all readable files (listed above) into basic HTML pages for online viewing, much like Google converts PDF documents into Web pages in its search results. The big downside to this program is its dependence on Microsoft’s IIS Web server, which has historically been a security nightmare. It also requires that the server run Windows which, according to Netcraft, has barely 20% of the Web server market.
Click here for a screen shot of dtSearch Web
Also included with the dtSearch suite is a diagnostic tool that analyzes system information and compiles it all into an XML-formatted report. From within the diagnostic tool you can combine these reports and dtSearch logs into a zip file. If there are problems with the index or with the software, this makes it very easy to email all of the necessary information to the system administrator.
Lastly, there is a small program that comes with dtSearch which extracts readable text strings from binary files.
dtSearch can be integrated directly into Java, C++, C#, ASP.NET, Delphi, and .Net programs. I tried to test the Java and C++ demonstration code on 64-bit Gentoo Linux, but they wouldn’t execute due to library dependency problems. I suspect this may mean that the dtSearch code is not 64-bit clean; there is no 64-bit edition of any part of the software available at this time.
More information on the dtSearch APIs can be found here.
Overall I found dtSearch 7 to be extremely useful as a desktop and network search tool. It goes far beyond the puny standalone applications meant for consumer-grade searching of small amounts of data. dtSearch is a relatively unique enterprise search product that is easily implemented; a fool could set up and use dtSearch, and any moderately experienced developer could implement the search libraries in a program. Considering all it can do and its lack of per-seat licensing requirements, dtSearch is quite reasonably priced.
Don’t ignore the need for robust storage with dtSearch. If you’re going to share indexes over a network, you will at very least need a decent dedicated server with SCSI or SATA RAID. If you’re sharing several large indexes over a network, a dedicated cluster may be necessary.
The end-user tools are intuitive and powerful; with a small degree of training, any user should be able to expertly search through indexes of company data. Once the indexes were built and the software set up and configured properly, I found the dtSearch Desktop and dtSearch Web interfaces to be just as easy — if not easier — to use as a common Web search engine like Google or Excite.
Despite the time it takes to create indexes, information retrieval on local searches is incredibly speedy — faster than searching Google over a broadband connection. Text inside of a variety of different formats is displayed in a viewer, so you don’t need Microsoft Word to search inside of Word documents. In short, it’s hard to find any significant shortcomings in dtSearch 7.0.
Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.
| Purpose | Desktop search tool and programming libraries |
| Manufacturer | dtSearch Corporation |
| Platforms and architectures | Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003, but the search engine libraries are cross-platform |
| License | Proprietary, restrictive in all the usual ways. Unlimited client access. |
| Market | Large businesses, developers in need of a third-party search algorithm |
| Price (retail) | US $1000 for a single-server license; $2500 for a three-server license; $200 for the desktop-only version; upgrades from version 6.x are free |
| Previous version | dtSearch 6.x |
| Product Web site | Click here |
Copyright 2005 Jem Matzan.
|
|
|
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
|
|
Copyright 2008. All content items belong to their respective authors.
