Search

Bargate has EXPERIMENTAL support for simple file name searches since 1.4.1.

Here be dragons!

The very notion of a client connecting to an SMB server to perform a search for file names is not a good one - performance is always going to be poor. The idea then that the web interface on top should provide searching to a user connecting over HTTPS - perhaps on the other side of the world - is even more of a bad idea. Despite this issue bargate does support searching but it is disabled by default.

Microsoft has (somewhat) mitigated the performance problem with the Windows Search Protocol extension to SMB, however Samba does not have any support for this so Bargate cannot utilise it.

If you decide to go ahead and enable searching please read about the SEARCH_TIMEOUT option and set it appropriately.

Enable searching

Set the config option SEARCH_ENABLED to ‘True’ and restart Bargate. Please however read the following section before doing that.

Search timeout

Searching on a slow SMB file server will take a long time - probably longer than the web server timeout. If bargate is still searching for longer than the timeout then the web server will kill the connection and return an error to the browser - probably an unhelpful “504 Gateway Timeout”. Worse still if you’re using uwsgi or similar then the process will keep searching behind the scenes. It may even be possible then for an attacker to perform a denial of service attack by searching a huge, slow file server.

To prevent this Bargate monitors how long the search is taking and stops searching when it reaches its own timeout configured via the SEARCH_TIMEOUT config option.

You should set this parameter to be less than the timeout the web server is configured to. If you’re using the recommended nginx+uwsgi set up then you should set the following nginx parameters like so:

location @bargate
{
    include uwsgi_params;
    uwsgi_param HTTPS on;
    uwsgi_pass unix:/var/run/uwsgi.sock;
    uwsgi_read_timeout 120s;
    uwsgi_send_timeout 120s;
}

You don’t need to set these as the default of 60 seconds for both is safest, but if you want users to be able to search for longer increase the values and increase SEARCH_TIMEOUT - but remember to keep it less than the uwsgi_read_timeout and uwsgi_send_timeout options.