Thunderstone Support Forums

Does Webinator 4 work with HTTPS?

Webinator can serve searches on an HTTPS machine.
The walker doesn't fetch from HTTPS at this time.

Full Texis would let you index secure pages by inserting the content directly into the table, if you're an administrator who has access to the data -- or if not, maybe you shouldn't be indexing that material?

Thanks for the info on HTTPS. I attempted to install Webinator and wantedto make sure there wasn't something I was doing incorrectly. I could not get past supplying a URL since Webinator specifically asks for an HTTP URL.

I would think the search capability would function such that it would check the permissions of the person searching and return to them what they are privileged to see.

Does this not happen?

It's not a permissions issue, it's a protocol issue. Webinator cannot currently communicate in the HTTPS protocol.

kai,

Yes, I understand and thanks for your input.

Does the search capability function such that it checks the permissions of the person searching and return to them what they are privileged to see?

The Webinator as it stands does not check permissions, and will show all the results it has crawled.

If there is a simple way to do the check based on the information provided in the HTTP search request then you can add that to the Webinator search script. One example would be if some documents are private, and some are public.

Often the permissions schemes are more complicated, and different documents can be seen by subsets of users. This requires the additional power of Texis to store all the permission information in the Texis database, and you can implement any permission logic you need.

I understand that Webinator 4.0 only runs on port 80 (HTTP).

Is it possible to place the Texis database portion behind a firewall so that the indexed information is not as vulnerable?

Webinator can only index information served via HTTP, however the actual search can occur over HTTPS. The database does need to be on the machine that is serving the search results, but beyond that it can be firewalled, although the free version does need to talk to our license server on port 80.

John, Does this also apply to the <fetch> statement from a in Vortex? i.e., doesn't support https but will in a release this summer?

Thanks,
Joan

yes