01
It sets itself up.
Boot the machine and walk away. It finds the network, works out what the hardware can do, gives itself a name, and joins the fleet. There is no wizard, no account to enter, and nothing to decide.
Indexer OS · The appliance
BOOT IT
ONCE
Sets itself up. Fixes itself.
Updates itself. Forever.
Spare hardware, with something to do again.
Indexer OS turns hardware an organisation already has into dedicated members of the fleet that keep the index fresh. It is installed once and looks after itself from there — if nobody thinks about it again, that is the intended outcome.
What it is
An appliance, not an operating system you use.
Most software asks something of you: install it, configure it, keep it patched, notice when it breaks. This asks nothing. It has one job — read pages and file them so they can be found — and every design decision serves getting that done on a machine nobody is looking after.
That means the machine becomes a single-purpose device. It is not a desktop you can also use, and it is not something you log into. If that's not what you want from the hardware, the no-reformat route exists precisely for that case.
Why it can be left alone
Four things it does without you.
A fleet made of donated machines in other people's homes only works if no one has to maintain it. So the appliance takes on the jobs an administrator would otherwise do.
02
It recovers itself.
Nodes lose power, lose connections, and get unplugged mid-sentence. The appliance expects all of it. Work in progress goes back to the fleet, and the machine picks up where it left off when it returns.
03
It updates itself.
Improvements arrive signed and install on their own schedule. A machine you set up months ago is running the same software as one set up this morning, without you visiting it.
04
It protects itself.
The appliance reads untrusted pages all day, so it is built to assume they are hostile. The reading is sealed off from everything else, and its traffic leaves through a privacy connection it manages on its own.
The console
One screen, for the rare day you look.
If the machine has a monitor, this is what it shows — on the device itself, with no sign-in. It answers the only questions worth asking: is it working, is it protected, and does it need anything.
askfinz-indexer-014
uptime 9d 04:17
Reading nowlive
Public research archivereading
1,204 pages
Government publicationsreading
860 pages
Regional news archivereading
2,317 pages
48,213
Filed today
2,904
Re-checked
311
Set aside
Terminalclosed
$
Illustration of the on-device console. Figures and reading targets are examples.
One screen, no login
Plug in a monitor and the console is already there. It is the machine talking to whoever is standing in front of it.
Answers, not readings
Every card resolves to something a person can act on — connected, protected, up to date — rather than numbers you have to interpret.
The controls you'd actually reach for
Join a different network, run a connection test, check for updates. The rest of the time there is nothing to press.
What it runs on
Hardware you already have.
There is no minimum worth deploying. A small machine reads steadily; a capable one takes on the heavier work as well. Both are worth more to the fleet than a machine sitting switched off.
installed by us
Desktops and laptops
Ordinary office hardware from the last decade is plenty. A machine with a graphics card becomes one of the most valuable in the fleet.
installed by us
Small boards
Low-power devices that are cheap to leave running. They read steadily and ask for almost nothing in return.
self-serve
Not a partner yet?
There is a self-serve route that installs alongside Windows on a machine you already own, changes nothing about how it boots, and removes in one line.
Run a node insteadFor partners
We install it for you.
Indexer OS isn't a download. It's deployed as part of a partnership — we prepare the appliance for the hardware it's going on, install it, and look after it from there. If you'd like your organisation's spare capacity contributing to the index, start with a conversation.
Already have hardware in mind?
Tell us what it is when you get in touch — office desktops, a machine with a graphics card, low-power boards — and we prepare the appliance around it.
- No build steps, and no instructions to follow wrongly.
- It arrives knowing what hardware it's going on.
- The machine is yours — take it back whenever you like.
Questions
Before you
hand one over.
- Does this wipe the machine?
- Yes — a machine running Indexer OS is a dedicated appliance, so its disk is used for that and nothing else. That is agreed up front as part of the deployment. For a machine that has to keep its existing system, the Windows route installs alongside it and removes cleanly.
- Do we need someone technical on site?
- No. There is nothing to configure and no commands to run. The appliance sets itself up on first boot, and the on-screen console is written for whoever happens to be standing in front of it.
- What if it goes wrong when nobody is there?
- That's the normal case, and it's designed for it. Nodes recover on their own after power cuts, dropped connections and restarts, and they update themselves without anyone visiting the machine.
- Does it need a screen?
- No. A machine with no monitor simply gets on with the work. The console is there for when you want to look, not because the node needs it.
- Can we stop and take the hardware back?
- At any time. Reinstall whatever you like on it — the fleet notices the machine has gone, hands its work to another node, and carries on.
Where next