Shellshock is one of the gravest vulnerability to hit Unix like operating systems ever. Everything from CGI scripts to DHCP client is affected. It lays countless websites, servers, PCs, OS X Macs, routers and other infrastructure open to hackers.

Searchdaimon does use Linux and did ship with an effected version of bash, the program that has the vulnerability. However none of the web facing services, like CGI scripts being executed by the web server or the ssh server was affected. However sins Searchdaimon is open source users may have made changes, or installed other software on their machines in addition to Searchdaimon.

There was also the issue with the DHCP client. Most Searchdaimon installations are server, and have a static IP address, but for thus that do use DHCP a malicious DHCP server on the local network could allow an attacker to run arbitrary code on the client machine.

We have therefore more or less been in emergency mode since we got the first warning email about this. However since this effected only a single install package, we made a fix within 15 minutes, sent it out to beta tester within two hours and updated everyone the next day.

The fix is now added to the automatic update system, so if you have not disabled automatic updates, or blocked it in your firewall your system in updated now.

More information about the Shellshock vulnerability in general is available at https://access.redhat.com/node/1200223 .

More information on our fix and how to do a manual install is available in our forum her: Update to address the “Shellshock” vulnerability is being sent out immediately (26.09.2014) .

This is an exciting time for us. Together with the open source community we hope we can build one of the best solutions for enterprise search yet.

Searchdaimon ES is a search engine for corporate data and websites. The ES comes with a powerful administrator interface and can index websites and several common enterprise systems like SharePoint, Exchange, SQL databases, Windows file shares etc. The ES supports many data sources (e.g., Word, PDF, and Excel) and the possibility of faceted search, attribute navigation and collection sorting.

The ES is normally deployed as an integrated suite with search software and Linux that one normally run as a virtual machine on cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, on one’s own hardware as a virtual machine using VMware, Xen or VirtualBox or directly on a physical server. The ES is mostly written in C and Perl. The company was founded in 2005.

• Official press release
• GitHub repository

More information about the product and screenshots are available at the bottom of this post.

General

• Road map to the future
• When to use and not to use the ES
• Help us translate the user interface to different languages
• How to upgrade existing installations to the open source version
• How Searchdaimon As, our company will make money

The release

We have released all of our source code related to the Searchdaimon enterprise search engine to GitHub, with full commit history. We will be using the GitHub repository internally as our only source code repository from now on. It is currently about 100K lines of code. These is the full source code, tools and build chain to build the ES.

The only exception is that we unfortunately have had to hold on to some related source code that uses proprietary code from 3-partys. However none of thus are essential, and binaries are made freely available for most of it. A list of non-released code is available at: Statement on non-open source code.

Try it out

An online demo is available at https://www.searchdaimon.com/demo/ (no registration is required)

Download

• Download prepackaged virtual machine images for VMware, Xen and VirtualBox
• Instructions on how to run on Amazon Web Services
• How to install from an CD or ISO file
• The source code and instructions on how to get started is available at GitHub

Some examples

Prices include the Searchdaimon ES software and Amazons EC2 fees, but not EBS fees and data transfer fees. For the US EAST (Virginia) region by the hour spot price. Prices for reserved and spot Instances will be lower. The price reduction will take effect immediately.

Amazon Web Services

As you may know Searchdaimon is available at Amazon Web Services (AWS). You can buy an Searchdaimon ES instances by the hour. You have no commitment beyond an hour and can come or go as you please.

If you have predictable, steady-state workloads, you can also reduce your cost further by buying AWS instances for a whole one year or three year.  This is equivalent to buying or leasing servers, like folks have done for years, only it is in the cloud. In both cases you will benefit from this price drop.

You can see a full list of the new, lower, pricing on the Searchdaimon AWS pricing page, and read more about running the Searchdaimon ES on AWS at the Searchdaimon AWS starting guide.

Link: http://www.arnoldit.com/search-wizards-speak/searchdaimon.html

Getting started guide: https://www.searchdaimon.com/aws/
More info about Searchdaimon ES at Amazon:  https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B008XME9MM

Named Amazon Web Services partner

Searchdaimon has also been named an Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner, and is among the first AWS Partners ever to gain public designation as a Standard Technology Partner. This will give Searchdaimon greater access to the technical team at AWS, ensuring that our search technology continues to meet your needs.

( And have been on Facbook for ages )

Administration panel

List documents in a collection

You may now list the documents in a collection.

Document information

You can also view info about each document directly from the administration panel. Great for viewing the result of data conversion, attributes and access control info.

Crawler console

Crawlers will output information on what they are doing, in real time.

Search

Some changes to the ranking algorithm to boost documents that has hits in the title or file name.

Core functions

• Support for setting your own crawler delay (delay in seconds between successive crawl requests to the same data source).
• The first time wizard is gone.
• Support for not having any end user management system ( Active Directory etc ).
• Attribute search also for public collections.
• Support for query caching.
• ++ several bug fixes.

This version will be automatically sent out to everyone during August.

You can also make your own custom Amazon machine image if you have very special needs, please see: Create your own Amazon machine image.

More info is available at http://www.enterprisesearcheurope.com/2012/Programme.aspx#session_5474

If anyone is interested in getting together during the conference, please feel free to email him at: rb [at] searchdaimon [dot] com .

Before and now:

Some of the source code for crawling has also been made public available at https://www.searchdaimon.com/source/