Searching SMB share from Mac

[ahmerali]

I did a search but couldn't find this specific answer. Quick Google search indicates its a known troublesome issue but there aren't enough people out there who care to peition Apple to make it better.

I have a user who has a Mac, he connects to an SMB share on a Windows Server, and when trying to search for files and folders on that share, Finder doesn't seem to show them.

Has anyone out there found a way to make this functionality work as it would from a Windows computer?

 

[stevenkan]

I have this same problem, with no good solution. I RDP into a Windows box

 

[Evil Lair]

I would usually use EasyFind, which also frequently finds local files Spotlight fails on. Only downside is you have to wait for it to crawl through the server, or speed things up by picking a particular folder.

 

[algebraist]

There's two issues here:

1) Spotlight doesn't work over SMB unless there is specific indexing infrastructure built into the server backend. That isn't present on Windows at all, and Windows Search won't do it either. You can (and I have) got it to work with Linux + SAMBA (inc Winbind for AD auth) + Elasticache + fs2-es indexer.

2) macOS will then default back to a standard search. Given macOS behaviour of interrogating SMB file by file, this approach ends up ridiculously slow.

As @Evil Lair said in his post, you either have to use a 3rd party app and wait for it to literally crawl through the entire SMB share or the backend needs rebuilt as a SAMBA box. Performance there isn't nearly as good as local Spotlight searches on the order of a few seconds instead of immediate but it's the only way I know to get acceptable performance search results.