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Elastic network drive connector reference

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Elastic network drive connector reference

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The Elastic network drive connector is a connector for network drive data sources. This connector is written in Python using the Elastic connector framework.

View the source code for this connector (branch 8.15, compatible with Elastic 8.15).

Choose your connector reference

Are you using a native connector on Elastic Cloud or a self-managed connector client? Expand the documentation based on your deployment method.

Native connector (Elastic Cloud)

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View native connector reference

Availability and prerequisites

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This connector is available as a native connector on Elastic Cloud, as of 8.9.1.

To use this connector natively in Elastic Cloud, satisfy all native connector requirements.

Usage

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To use this connector natively in Elastic Cloud, see Native connectors (managed service).

Configuration

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The following configuration fields are required to set up the connector:

Username
The username of the account for the network drive. The user must have at least read permissions for the folder path provided.
Password
The password of the account to be used for crawling the network drive.
IP address
The server IP address where the network drive is hosted. Default value is 127.0.0.1.
Port
The server port where the network drive service is available. Default value is 445.
Path
  • The network drive path the connector will crawl to fetch files. This is the name of the folder shared via SMB. The connector uses the Python smbprotocol library which supports both SMB v2 and v3.
  • Accepts only one path— parent folders can be specified to widen the scope.

  • The drive path should use forward slashes as path separators. Example:

    • admin/bin
Enable document level security

Toggle to enable document level security (DLS). When enabled:

  • Full syncs will fetch access control lists for each document and store them in the _allow_access_control field.

  • Access control syncs will fetch users' access control lists and store them in a separate index. Default value is false.

    Refer to Document level security for more information, including prerequisites and limitations.

Identity mappings

Path to a CSV file containing user and group SIDs (For Linux Network Drive).

File should be formatted as follows:

  • Fields separated by semicolons (;)
  • Three fields per line: Username;User-SID;Group-SIDs

  • Group-SIDs are comma-separated and optional.

    Example with one username, user-sid and no group:

    user1;S-1;

    Example with one username, user-sid and two groups:

    user1;S-1;S-11,S-22

Documents and syncs

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The connector syncs folders as separate documents in Elasticsearch. The following fields will be added for the document type folder:

  • create_time
  • title
  • path
  • modified
  • time
  • id
  • Content from files bigger than 10 MB won’t be extracted. (Self-managed connectors can use the self-managed local extraction service to handle larger binary files.)
  • Permissions are not synced by default. You must first enable DLS. Otherwise, all documents indexed to an Elastic deployment will be visible to all users with access to that Elastic Deployment.
Sync types
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Full syncs are supported by default for all connectors.

This connector also supports incremental syncs.

Document level security

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Document Level Security (DLS) enables you to restrict access to documents based on a user’s permissions. DLS facilitates the syncing of folder and file permissions, including both user and group level permissions.

Note: Refer to DLS in Search Applications to learn how to search data with DLS enabled, when building a search application.

Availability
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  • The present version of Network Drive connector offers DLS support for Windows network drives only.
  • To fetch users and groups in a Windows network drive, account credentials added in the connector configuration should have access to the Powershell of the Windows Server where the network drive is hosted.

Sync rules

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Basic sync rules are identical for all connectors and are available by default.

Advanced sync rules
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A full sync is required for advanced sync rules to take effect.

Advanced sync rules are defined through a source-specific DSL JSON snippet. Advanced sync rules for this connector use glob patterns.

  1. Each rule must contains a glob pattern. This pattern is then matched against all the available folder paths inside the configured drive path.
  2. The pattern must begin with the drive_path field configured in the connector.
  3. If the pattern matches any available folder paths, the contents directly within those folders will be fetched.

The following sections provide examples of advanced sync rules for this connector.

Indexing files and folders recursively within folders
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[
  {
    "pattern": "Folder-shared/a/mock/**"
  },
  {
    "pattern": "Folder-shared/b/alpha/**"
  }
]
Indexing files and folders directly inside folder
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[
  {
    "pattern": "Folder-shared/a/b/test"
  }
]
Indexing files and folders directly inside a set of folders
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[
  {
    "pattern": "Folder-shared/org/*/all-tests/test[135]"
  }
]
Excluding files and folders that match a pattern
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[
  {
    "pattern": "Folder-shared/**/all-tests/test[!7]"
  }
]

Content extraction

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See Content extraction.

Known issues

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  • Network Drive Connector may fail to connect to some shares

    In versions prior to 8.15.3, the Network Drive Connector used an older version of the smbprotocol Python library. This version could incorrectly determine protocol parameters if the requesting host met specific edge case criteria.

    You can read more about this bug here: https://github.com/jborean93/smbprotocol/issues/199

    If your Network Drive Connector is failing to connect to your share, consider updating to versions >= 8.15.3.

    See Known issues for any issues affecting all connectors.

Troubleshooting

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See Troubleshooting.

Security

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See Security.

Connector client (self-managed)

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View connector client reference

Availability and prerequisites

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This connector is available as a self-managed connector client. This connector client is compatible with Elastic versions 8.6.0+.

To use this connector, satisfy all connector client requirements.

Usage

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To use this connector as a connector client, see Connector clients (self-managed)For additional usage operations, see Using connectors.

Configuration

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When using the connector client workflow, initially these fields will use the default configuration set in the connector source code. These are set in the get_default_configuration function definition.

These configurable fields will be rendered with their respective labels in the Kibana UI. Once connected, you’ll be able to update these values in Kibana.

The following configuration fields are required to set up the connector:

username
The username of the account for the network drive. The user must have at least read permissions for the folder path provided.
password
The password of the account to be used for crawling the network drive.
server_ip
The server IP address where the network drive is hosted. Default value is 127.0.0.1.
server_port
The server port where the network drive service is available. Default value is 445.
drive_path
  • The network drive path the connector will crawl to fetch files. This is the name of the folder shared via SMB. The connector uses the Python smbprotocol library which supports both SMB v2 and v3.
  • Accepts only one path— parent folders can be specified to widen the scope.

  • The drive path should use forward slashes as path separators. Example:

    • admin/bin
use_document_level_security

Toggle to enable document level security (DLS). When enabled:

  • Full syncs will fetch access control lists for each document and store them in the _allow_access_control field.

  • Access control syncs will fetch users' access control lists and store them in a separate index.

    Refer to Document level security for more information, including prerequisites and limitations.

drive_type

The type of network drive to be crawled. The following options are available:

  • Windows
  • Linux
identity_mappings

Path to a CSV file containing user and group SIDs (For Linux Network Drive).

File should be formatted as follows:

  • Fields separated by semicolons (;)
  • Three fields per line: Username;User-SID;Group-SIDs

  • Group-SIDs are comma-separated and optional.

    Example with one username, user-sid and no group:

    user1;S-1;

    Example with one username, user-sid and two groups:

    user1;S-1;S-11,S-22

Deployment using Docker

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You can deploy the Network drive connector as a self-managed connector client using Docker. Follow these instructions.

Step 1: Download sample configuration file

Download the sample configuration file. You can either download it manually or run the following command:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elastic/connectors/main/config.yml.example --output ~/connectors-config/config.yml

Remember to update the --output argument value if your directory name is different, or you want to use a different config file name.

Step 2: Update the configuration file for your self-managed connector

Update the configuration file with the following settings to match your environment:

  • elasticsearch.host
  • elasticsearch.api_key
  • connectors

If you’re running the connector service against a Dockerized version of Elasticsearch and Kibana, your config file will look like this:

# When connecting to your cloud deployment you should edit the host value
elasticsearch.host: http://host.docker.internal:9200
elasticsearch.api_key: <ELASTICSEARCH_API_KEY>

connectors:
  -
    connector_id: <CONNECTOR_ID_FROM_KIBANA>
    service_type: network_drive
    api_key: <CONNECTOR_API_KEY_FROM_KIBANA> # Optional. If not provided, the connector will use the elasticsearch.api_key instead

Using the elasticsearch.api_key is the recommended authentication method. However, you can also use elasticsearch.username and elasticsearch.password to authenticate with your Elasticsearch instance.

Note: You can change other default configurations by simply uncommenting specific settings in the configuration file and modifying their values.

Step 3: Run the Docker image

Run the Docker image with the Connector Service using the following command:

docker run \
-v ~/connectors-config:/config \
--network "elastic" \
--tty \
--rm \
docker.elastic.co/enterprise-search/elastic-connectors:8.15.4.0 \
/app/bin/elastic-ingest \
-c /config/config.yml

Refer to DOCKER.md in the elastic/connectors repo for more details.

Find all available Docker images in the official registry.

We also have a quickstart self-managed option using Docker Compose, so you can spin up all required services at once: Elasticsearch, Kibana, and the connectors service. Refer to this README in the elastic/connectors repo for more information.

Documents and syncs

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The connector syncs folders as separate documents in Elasticsearch. The following fields will be added for the document type folder:

  • create_time
  • title
  • path
  • modified
  • time
  • id
  • Content from files bigger than 10 MB won’t be extracted
  • Permissions are not synced by default. You must first enable DLS. Otherwise, all documents indexed to an Elastic deployment will be visible to all users with access to that Elastic Deployment.
Sync types
edit

Full syncs are supported by default for all connectors.

This connector also supports incremental syncs.

Document level security

edit

Document Level Security (DLS) enables you to restrict access to documents based on a user’s permissions. DLS facilitates the syncing of folder and file permissions, including both user and group level permissions.

Note: Refer to DLS in Search Applications to learn how to search data with DLS enabled, when building a search application.

Availability
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  • The Network Drive connector client offers DLS support for both Windows and Linux network drives.
  • To fetch users and groups in a Windows network drive, account credentials added in the connector configuration should have access to the Powershell of the Windows Server where the network drive is hosted.

Sync rules

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Basic sync rules are identical for all connectors and are available by default.

Advanced sync rules
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A full sync is required for advanced sync rules to take effect.

Advanced sync rules are defined through a source-specific DSL JSON snippet. Advanced sync rules for this connector use glob patterns.

  1. Each rule must contains a glob pattern. This pattern is then matched against all the available folder paths inside the configured drive path.
  2. The pattern must begin with the drive_path field configured in the connector.
  3. If the pattern matches any available folder paths, the contents directly within those folders will be fetched.

The following sections provide examples of advanced sync rules for this connector.

Indexing files and folders recursively within folders
edit
[
  {
    "pattern": "Folder-shared/a/mock/**"
  },
  {
    "pattern": "Folder-shared/b/alpha/**"
  }
]
Indexing files and folders directly inside folder
edit
[
  {
    "pattern": "Folder-shared/a/b/test"
  }
]
Indexing files and folders directly inside a set of folders
edit
[
  {
    "pattern": "Folder-shared/org/*/all-tests/test[135]"
  }
]
Excluding files and folders that match a pattern
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[
  {
    "pattern": "Folder-shared/**/all-tests/test[!7]"
  }
]

Content extraction

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See Content extraction.

End-to-end tests

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The connector framework enables operators to run functional tests against a real data source. Refer to Connector testing for more details.

To execute a functional test for the Network Drive connector client, run the following command:

$ make ftest NAME=network_drive

By default, this will use a medium-sized dataset. For faster tests add the DATA_SIZE=small flag:

make ftest NAME=network_drive DATA_SIZE=small

Known issues

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  • Network Drive Connector may fail to connect to some shares

    In versions prior to 8.15.3, the Network Drive Connector used an older version of the smbprotocol Python library. This version could incorrectly determine protocol parameters if the requesting host met specific edge case criteria.

    You can read more about this bug here: https://github.com/jborean93/smbprotocol/issues/199

    If your Network Drive Connector is failing to connect to your share, consider updating to versions >= 8.15.3.

    See Known issues for any issues affecting all connectors.

Troubleshooting

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See Troubleshooting.

Security

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See Security.

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