[Samba] OSX searching NAS and Samba

[Ralph Boehme]

On 4/5/22 15:47, Deas, Jim via samba wrote:
> Does OSX Finder use Spotlight for its searches? I see that
> Elasticsearch and fscrawler is suggested for spotlight support, but
> does it also support OSX Finder the same way?

well, OS Finder uses Spotlight macOS APIs which the system translated to 
some proprietary RPC (mdsdsv) which is then sent over SMB. It's up to 
the SMB server to understand this RPC and use its own backend to process 
the RPCs.

Samba implements the mdssvc RPC and these days prefers using 
Elasticsearch as search store.

Beware that as the mdssvc RPC protocol is proprietary and undocumented, 
I had to reverse engineer the protocol from the ground up, so there's a 
good chance that some there are enough sharp corners to cut yourself. :)

According to customer feedback, it seems to work surprisingly better 
then I would have thought.

Cheers!
-slow

-- 
Ralph Boehme, Samba Team                 https://samba.org/
SerNet Samba Team Lead      https://sernet.de/en/team-samba