Many sites use Index Server to index multiple Web servers, especially in a corporate intranet environment. This is done by simply sharing a folder on the remote volume and creating a virtual directory on the indexing server. However, in some cases, especially if the remote system actually hosts an HTML Web, links can get broken because the share was not made at the correct point in the hierarchy. Consider the following example.
Local Computer: Local
Remote Computer: Remote
Remote Web Root: \\Remote\InetPub\Wwwroot
Remote Web 1 Directory: \\Remote\InetPub\Wwwroot\Web1
Remote Share: \\Remote\Web1
Remote Share Mounted Locally: http://local/specs
In the preceding example, the shared directory that is indexed is D:\InetPub\Wwwroot\Web1. In the Index Server default .htx file, links are returned as <%server%><%vpath%>, so on the local computer remote files are returned through the reference http://local/specs. This usually breaks links because the Web pages with physical directories ending in Web1 (such as \Remote\InetPub\Wwwroot\Web1) probably contain links to virtual roots beginning with http://remote (such as http://remote/web1).
To fix this problem you can share out the Web root directories and modify your .htx file as follows.
Local Computer: Local
Remote Computer: Remote
Remote Web Root: \\Remote\InetPub\Wwwroot
Remote Web 1 Directory: \\Remote\InetPub\Wwwroot\Web1
Remote Share: \\Remote\Wwwroot
Remote Share Mounted Locally: /Remote
Note that the remote share is now the Wwwroot directory, and its virtual directory on the indexing computer (local) is /remote. The last step is to modify the .htx file to return hyperlinks as “http:/<%vpath%>”. This setting returns the correct hyperlink for all documents stored on the remote computer.
For example, if a document on the remote computer was referenced as http://remote/web1/sample.doc, it would normally be served by the indexing computer (local) as http://local/remote/web1/sample.doc, because its VPath is /remote/web1/sample.doc. However the .htx modification inserts an http:/ reference before the VPath so the URL that is actually returned is now http://remote/web1/sample.doc, which is the correct URL.
This configuration allows the remote servers to do all the file serving, leaving the indexing server free to do all the serving.