The Broker is automatically started by the RunHarvest command. Other relevant commands are described in Section 3.7.
In the current section we discuss various ways users can customize and tune the Broker, how to administrate the Broker, and the various Broker programming interfaces.
As suggested in Figure 1, the Broker uses a flexible indexing interface that supports a variety of indexing subsystems. The default Harvest Broker uses Glimpse [14] as an indexer, but other indexers such as WAIS [13] (both freeWAIS and WAIS, Inc.'s commercial version) and Nebula [6] also work with the Broker (see Section 5.8).
To create a new Broker, run the CreateBroker program. It will ask you a series of questions about how you'd like to configure your Broker, and then automatically create and configure it. To start your Broker, use the RunBroker program that CreateBroker generates. The Broker should be started when your system reboots. To prevent a collection while starting the broker, use the -nocol option. Recent distributions include a RunBrokers.sh script in the lib/broker directory which can be executed from your system startup scripts. There are a number of ways you can customize or tune the Broker, discussed in Sections 5.7 and 5.8. You may also use the RunHarvest command, discussed in Section 3.7, to create both a Broker and a Gatherer.