Adding or Modifying Remote Indexes

When two or more Coveo instances co-exist within an organization, you can use the remote index feature to set up geographically distributed indexing (GDI) (see About Geographically Distributed Indexing).

You can configure a .NET search interface attached to one Coveo instance to send queries to a remote Coveo instance. The local Coveo instance merges and ranks results received from both the local and remote indexes (see Setting up Geographically Distributed Indexing).

The following procedure describes how to add or modify remote indexes in the Administration Tool for a Coveo instance from which you want to query remote indexes.

Note: You can add several remote indexes by repeating the following procedure. The remote indexes defined will not be automatically queried. You must also add a remote index to the scope of a .NET search interface from which you want to receive remote index results (see Configuring the Scope of a .NET Search Interface).

To add or modify a remote index

1. Connect to the Coveo Master server of the Coveo instance from which you want to query a remote index.

2. Access the Administration Tool (see Opening the Administration Tool).

3. In the Administration Tool, select Index > Remote Indexes.

4. In the Remote Indexes page, perform one of the following actions:

   1. To add a new remote index, click Add.

      OR

   2. To modify an existing remote index, click the name of the appropriate server.

5. In the Add Remote Index or existing remote index page:

   

   1. In the Name box, enter a name that identifies this remote index. The name must not include spaces.

      This name will appear in the .NET Interface Editor in the page where you can configure the scope of a .NET search interface and will not be visible by end-users in .NET search interfaces.

   2. In the Description box, enter a description for the remote index (ex.: content, location, etc.) to help you uniquely identify this remote index.

   3. Under Services Information:

      1. In the Services Host box, enter the host name for the Master server of the Coveo remote index.

      2. In the Services Port box, if different from the default value (52810), change the port for the Coveo Web service port on the remote index server.

         Note: Do not confuse this port with the CES service port (52800 by default).

      3. In the Instance Name box, in the rare case where your remote index instance name is different from default, enter the correct instance name.

         Tip: At the end of the .NET search interface URL for the remote Coveo instance, add the ?&Debug=1 argument to get debug information containing the Instance, Mirror, and Physical index name (see Getting Debug Information from a .NET Search Interface).

      4. Click Validate.

         Note: If a connection error message appears at the top of the page, verify that on the Coveo remote Master server, the firewall allows incoming connections to the Services Port.

         Example: Error message example: 

         Could not connect to http://YourServerName:52810/7.0/CoveoAdminService. TCP error code 10060: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.

         When the remote server responds, a few more parameters appear in the Services Information section to specify the credentials of an administrator account to use on the remote Coveo Master server to be allowed to configure the remote index.

         

      5. In the Services Security Provider drop-down box, select the Coveo security provider that can resolve the administrator credentials on the remote Coveo server.

         Select Active Directory when your administrator account is a Windows account.

      6. In the Services User Name box, enter the user name of the administrator account.

      7. In the Services User Password box, enter the administrator account password.

      8. Click Validate Credentials to verify that the credentials allow a connection to the web services on the remote Coveo server.

   4. In the Local to Remote Mirror Mapping section, for each local mirror, you can specify to which remote mirror the queries will be sent:

      

      1	Local mirror
      2	Selection of remote mirror to which queries are sent

      Note: By default the index on a Master server is referred to as the Default mirror.

      • Choose the Select a mirror option and then in the drop-down list, select one of the available remote instance mirrors.

        OR

      1. Choose the Configure mirror manually option.

      2. In the Mirror Hostname box, enter the hostname of the Mirror server to which you want to forward queries.

      3. In the Mirror Port box, when different from the default (52800), enter the CES service port for the Mirror server to which you want to forward queries.

      Example: A local Coveo instance has one Front-End server that sends queries to the Master server, while a second Front-End sends its queries to a Mirror server. You want to add a remote index that has two Mirror servers. Because the remote Master server is often busy indexing content, you want to forward the queries sent to the local Master server (Default mirror) to the remote Mirror1 mirror and the queries sent to the local Mirror1 mirror to remote Mirror2 mirror.

      

   5. Click Save.

What's Next?

On the Coveo Front-End server of the local Coveo instance, add the remote index to the scope of a .NET search interface (see Configuring the Scope of a .NET Search Interface).