Searching an SMB mounted Winodws Share

hkabik
Valued Contributor

Should I be able to search, not spotlight obviously just a basic Finder search, an SMB mounted Windows share? I seem to not be able to.

Is there a best practices for making this work? We're looking at decomming a bunch of old Xserves and moving the data to our Windows shares but my Mac User's don's seem to be able to search those shares when mounted.

EasyFind works, though slowly, but I'd really like my users to be able to search directly from the Finder.

5 REPLIES 5

SGill
Contributor III

It's hiding under "Shared" in the Finder.

I get good results from both AFP and SMB in 10.12.5

hkabik
Valued Contributor

Is there anything you had to so server side, or configure workstation side? We get no results on SMB mounted Windows Shares. :/

SGill
Contributor III

If you query the Windows Properties of the SMB network share under the General Tab there is an "Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties" checkbox --is that checked? It's checked here, but likely our admins had to configure that centrally.

You might have to check it from Windows 8 or 10 to see these choices--these properties are invisible to the mac finder.

hkabik
Valued Contributor

Is it a matter of local indexing? Do I just need to leave myself connected to the volume long enough for it to fully index it to my spotlight DB?

SGill
Contributor III

You could try force rebuilding a new Spotlight index to see if that helps --I've seen that fix quite a few search problems. Handy cmd in case you don't have it:

sudo mdutil -E /