Enable Spotlight Indexing for Network Drives Possible?

Hi,

I had a similar problem and now have networked spotlight working with El Capitan clients and server. I saw the same error as you did with mdutil(1) but the search seems to work works fine using Finder.

The only thing that's a bit of a pain is you need make sure the 'Shared' scope is selected in Finder as opposed to 'This Mac' or 'Desktop'. If you're using ⌘-Space to search you only seem to see results from network drives on you choose 'Show all in Finder' at the bottom of that popup.

I don't recall seeing any indexing done on the client so perhaps some other part of the spotlight mechanism is allowing access to the servers spotlight index?

P

I don't run as admin, my error message was:

Error: unable to perform operation. Try as root. (-403)

Server search enabled.

As keeniemeenie (great handle) noted you can't use the cmd-spacebar search. You have to use Finder "Find" to bring up the full search dialog and you have to choose "Shared". I created a Saved Search (in my Favorites sidebar) I can use to search my network share. I'm using AFP (still), not sure if this works as well with SMB.

It's clearly unsupported in El Capitan, I wonder if it's supported in OS X Server. I won't be on Sierra until summer 2017.

On a Mac server i.e. running Server.app it appears the server itself still does server-side Spotlight indexing. While there is no longer a tick box to enable/disable this per share on the server, when you do share a folder you can see a special ACL for the Spotlight process is added so it can have the access needed to index the contents of the folder and sub-folders. This should these days work for both AFP and SMB access to the Mac file server.

Windows Server itself has for a long time no longer had AFP support. However it is still possible to get Acronis Access formerly known as ExtremeZ-IP which adds AFP capabilities to a Windows Server and adds Spotlight indexing support as well.

See - https://kb.acronis.com/content/48794

Linux Servers use either Netatalk for providing AFP support, or SAMBA for providing SMB support. Both these have been enhanced to again include server-side Spotlight indexing. Sadly most but not all NAS servers even though they use Linux and Netatalk and/or SAMBA have not yet provided Spotlight support. I believe some Synology versions do now support Spotlight.

See - http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Spotlight

See - https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Spotlight

Apple only wants Mac users to be able to search Mac formatted drives that are directly connected to Macs.