I have from time-to-time posted questions to this list (and received very prompt and helpful responses). But it seems that many of you are operating in a very different space from me. The problems (and lessons-learned) which I encounter are often very different from those that are reflected in exchanges with most other participants.
So I thought it would be useful to describe what I'm about, and see if there are others out there with similar implementations (or interest in moving in that direction). A sort of pay-forward. We (the Lakota Peoples Law Office) are a small public interest, pro bono law firm actively engaged in defending Native American North Dakota Water Protector clients against (ridiculously excessive) criminal charges. I have a small Solr (6.6.0) implementation - just one shard. I'm using the cloud mode mainly to be able to implement access controls. The server is an ordinary (2.5GHz) laptop running Ubuntu 16.04 with 8GB of RAM and 4 cpu processors. We presently have 8 collections with a total of about 60,000 documents, mostly pdfs and emails. The indexed documents are partly our own files and partly those we obtain through legal discovery (which, surprisingly, is allowed in ND for criminal cases). We only have a few users (our lawyers and a couple of researchers mostly), so traffic is minimal. However, there's a premium on precision (and recall) in searches. The document repository is local to the server. I piggyback on the embedded Jetty httpd in order to serve files (selected from the hitlists). I just use a symbolic link to tie the repository to Solr/Jetty's "webapp" subdirectory. We provide remote access via ssh with port forwarding. It provides very snappy performance, with fully encrypted links. Appears quite stable. I've had some bizarre behavior apparently caused by an interaction between repository permissions, solr permissions and the ssh link. I seem "solved" for the moment, but time will tell for how long. If there are any folks out there who have similar requirements, I'd be more than happy to share the insights I've gained and problems I've encountered and (I think) overcome. There are so many unique parts of this small scale, specialized application (many dimensions of which are not strictly internal to Solr) that it probably won't be appreciated to dump them on this (excellent) Solr list. So, if you encounter problems peculiar to this kind of setup, we can perhaps help handle them off-list (although if they have more general Solr application, we should, of course, post them to the list). Terry Steichen
