Spotlight and Indexing Network Shares

[Auggie]

This used to work sometime ago under an older version of Mojave, but one update or another Spotlight stopped indexing my SMB network share on a NAS.

I've tried adding then removing it from Spotlight's Privacy tab to no avail and I just gave up.

New 2019 Mac Pro and Monterey later, I once tried to get Spotlight to index my network share and no joy.

Is this a known issue/deprecation? Or are there ways beyond the Privacy tab procedure to get Spotlight to index a network share?

 

[chown33]

You could take a look at the mdutil command in Terminal.

man mdutil

 

[appltech]

Hi! I've found a similar post, but they used and app called Alfred instead of spotlight. Can't find any info about spotlight working with smb shares yet

 

[Auggie]

You could take a look at the mdutil command in Terminal.

man mdutil

I checked the volume and it states "Server search enabled".

Unable to list the metadata because "datastore publishing not implemented" so I'm not sure what's been indexed.

I tried dumping the VolumeConfig.plist but nothing is outputted.

List directory contents shows a /.Spotlight-V100 exists.

Not sure mdutil can provide me any resolution to this situation...

 

[Auggie]

Hi! I've found a similar post, but they used and app called Alfred instead of spotlight. Can't find any info about spotlight working with smb shares yet

If I can't get Spotlight to work, I'm willing to investigate third party solutions, so I'm giving Alfred a go...

 

[Auggie]

UPDATE:

I've tried Alfred but it does not allow me to search a specific location, such as the network share in question, and the full "hit" list doesn't appear to include anything on network shares as it appears to use Spotlight's indexed database for results, however, Alfred finds "hits" that Spotlight does not, so I'm not completely sure if it uses Spotlight or maybe it includes Spotlight plus its own indexed database search; or maybe there is a bug with Spotlight in the current beta version of Monterey.

The only third party solution that I found to work is Path Finder: it may take a while to find a hit because it scans the specified path only upon execution of the search.