silicontrip

Q: Tools for (spotlight) indexing NAS drives

I'm looking for a tool to index a NAS drive shared among a team of Mac designers connected via NFS.  The NAS only supports SMB and NFS.

 

I've tried enabling spotlight on the network drive for an individual client however the index is stored locally on the client machine and not shared on the network, so every machine will need to build the index, which takes a long time.

I'm looking for a tool to index the network share and make those indexes available for searching. Ideally some form of indexing daemon which builds an index that spotlight can search and is periodically run on a dedicated machine.

 

I've looked on google and pretty much any search including "OSX" and "file indexing" leads back to spotlight.  I tried looking into the spotlight API to build my own tool but it only seems to cover metadata extraction and nothing about storing the data in a way that spotlight could search.  I would then have to write a search tool, I'm only familiar with writing unix daemons not gui tools.

 

Some of the posts in this forum mention that this indexing must be performed on the NAS device.  I don't know of any enterprise NAS that allows 3rd party software to be run.   Even if it could be run, Apple don't make tools available enabling the device to build it's own spotlight index

 

With apple moving away from the server market I'm surprised they aren't making more tools like this available.

 

Does anyone know of tool that fit this specific requirement?

 

Thanks

Posted on May 31, 2016 8:17 PM

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Q: Tools for (spotlight) indexing NAS drives

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  • by John Lockwood,

    John Lockwood John Lockwood Jun 1, 2016 7:28 AM in response to silicontrip
    Level 6 (9,309 points)
    Servers Enterprise
    Jun 1, 2016 7:28 AM in response to silicontrip

    Spotlight seems to only work over AFP at least with regards to NAS drives. There are three possible solutions I see, one of which it sounds you may not be able to do and it is up to you whether either of the others is suitable for you.

     

    1. Many NAS drives do indeed support AFP as well as SMB and NFS, almost all such NAS drives would use an open-source version of AFP called Netatalk, the latest version of Netatalk also has the ability to index an AFP share for use with Spotlight. See http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Spotlight Unfortunately most NAS drives do not turn this on even if they have a new enough version installed, and I cannot answer as to whether a manual option to enable it is possible, you would have to speak to the particular NAS supplier.
    2. A company called GroupLogic which has since been bought by Acronis, made a product formerly called ExtremeZ-IP which is now called Acronis Access Connect. This originally added just an AFP server function to a standard Windows Server but more recently also added the ability to index a Windows server for access via Spotlight over AFP of course. This was then extended to be able to connect to a NAS server, and re-share it via AFP from the Windows server and again index it for use with Spotlight. In other words it made the NAS drive both available via AFP and searchable via Spotlight. Clearly this will do what you need but it also requires a Windows server and the purchase of Acronis Access Connect. See https://kb.acronis.com/content/48794
    3. A Mac server can connect to a standard NFS server i.e. your NAS, the Mac server can then re-share the NFS volume via AFP and the Mac server can index the volume for searching via Spotlight, in effect doing a similar task to what ExtremeZ-IP/Acronis Access Connect do on a Windows Server.

     

    Note: The NFS feature in OS X is hidden, you will have to configure it manually.

  • by silicontrip,

    silicontrip silicontrip Jun 1, 2016 4:33 PM in response to John Lockwood
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Mac OS X
    Jun 1, 2016 4:33 PM in response to John Lockwood

    Unfortunately none of these solutions are suitable.

    I've been investigating this problem for weeks. I've read all the other solutions and this is my last desperate attempt to get a solution.

    The device does not support Afp. I've contacted the manufacturer about it and they are not interested in adding that functionally .

    This device has 8 10Gbe interfaces on it, trying to push it through a single machine would cripple it.

     

    That's why I'm wondering if there is a separate tool that could perform scheduled  indexing and share it's index among multiple clients. I was hoping spotlight could be configured to do this as it seems silly to reinvent the wheel.

     

    I've looked at tools like devonthink and foxtrot.  But they have poor scheduling, no command line interface for running it out of Cron. Tie up the index while building so no client can access it during a reindex.  Indexing the data takes over a day so it can't be tied up while it's rebuilding.

     

    Does anyone have apples ear and can say hey people are wanting spotlight on network drives. And would like a manual way to schedule a rebuild . As fsevents won't work on a network.

     

    Surely I can't be the only person in this situation.