Hi guys

I'm trying to access an Indexing Service located on a remote machine usin
the distributed query functionality of MS-SQLServer

On a newsgroup on Goggle I found an old article in which it was describe
a configuration that I replicated but with no lucky

I have two Windows 2000 (SP4) boxes with MS-SQLServer 2000 Enterprise Ed. (SP3)

On the first server (server1), the Indexing Server is up & running
the service is configured using Local System Account and is allowe
to interact with the desktop

On the second box (Server2), the Indexing Service is stopped. I've configure
a linked server using the following system procedure call
 
  sp_addlinkedserver FileSystem, 'Index Server', 'MSIDXS', 'System

Then, using SQL Query Analyzer connected with Server2, I run this statement

SELECT *  FROM OPENQUERY(FileSystem,  'SELECT Directory, FileName
                        DocAuthor, Size, Create, Writ
             FROM server1.System..SCOPE ('' "c:\" '') WHERE CONTAINS(''microsoft'')
         

It fails  providing the following messages

Server: Msg 7399, Level 16, State 1, Line
Provider OLE DB 'MSIDXS' signaled an error.
[OLE/DB provider returned message: Unspecified error
[OLE/DB provider returned message: Invalid catalog name 'SYSTEM'. SQLSTATE=42000
OLE DB Error Trace [OLE/DB Provider 'MSIDXS' ICommandPrepare::Prepare returned 0x80004005:   ]

Note that if I open SQL Query Analyzer on server1 and I run the same statement
(a sort of loop-back ?!?), the query works fine

Do you know what is going on ?

I'm wondering if this kind of configuration is supported. Looking in the documentatio
I wasn't able to find any answer. Do you know if, for MSIDXS OLE/DB provider, the
distributed query facility is limited to the server where both SQLServer and Indexin
Server are running

As you know, indexing is a quite expansive task; so I would like to perfom it on
dedicated server. If distributed query doesn't address this scenario, can I us
something else ? I also tried some ADO programming, but I found no way to specif
a remote source in the connnection string: does the MSIDXS provider support onl
local connection

Many thanks for your kind repl