Technical Details

File access security and hidden results

PixStor Search tries to reflect the same file access permissions as the OS.

So if a user doesn’t have permission to ‘see’ a file - e.g. stat reports ‘file not found’ - then the file won’t be visible in Search. Instead, they will see “N files hidden” in the bottom left corner of the UI

If the user doesn’t have permission to read a file, then they will see the file in Search, but only ‘stat-only’ metadata, and no proxies. The preview panel in the Search UI should show a lock symbol to indicate this is the case.

Pagination

File access filtering can’t be applied at the database level. Instead, the backend has to fetch a page of results, then apply the filtering - removing any hidden results.

Consequently, you may have to scroll through several pages until you find some non-hidden results (you might also try refining your search)

Deleted files

The file access check can’t tell the difference between a file which you don’t have permission to see, and a file which doesn’t exist.

If you have ‘god’ permission (bypass_file_access_security) and are still seeing hidden results, it’s likely there are lots of DB entries for no longer existing files.

To resolve the issue, check that incremental ingest is running okay. Try running searchctl admin cleandb to clear out any leftover, non-existent file entries.