Google Mini Server Views

• General Goods

A quick and easy win for Microsoft. You can’t beat free, and the circumstance where you need to buy a license (load-balanced search servers) is uncommon enough that those who need it can afford the minor software fee. For many organizations, the Google Mini’s rather reasonable cost to purchase the box ($2999 for the standard model with 2 years of support) is less of a burden than the hosting costs associated with racking it up.

All services within Google Search Appliance or Google Mini sit behind a firewall. The firewall is the main source of security for the device against malicious hackers. No communication can connect to or connect from these servers without first going through the firewall. The firewall allows only a small set of ports to pass into the system: ports 8000 or 8443 for access to the console, port 443 for serving secure queries, and port 80 or 7800 for serving queries. Port 9941 is a Version Manager service for upgrading the appliance, and port 1111 is reserved for a configuration manager for network parameter setup. Outgoing traffic is limited to mail, crawling, NTP, DNS, and serving.

A simple secure search solution can be created with a Google Mini server. This is useful for intranet applications where a single Google mini is to be used to provide searches of different document repositories. Out of the box, the Google Mini does not provide any authentication or security mechanism. As the Google Mini is a sealed unit with a limited web interface, not much can be done to add security within the Google Mini.

Google Mini - starting with the Google Mini, create document sub-collections for each directory you want to secure. In my case that was two collections. One sub-collection being a set of documents spanning two different servers which were to have company wide acess and the other sub-collection being a directory full of documents on a secretarial server. This latter group of documents was only to be available to the front office group and to company executives.