HT204014 How can I get spotlight search to work over a network running OS X Server?

Question

I have installed OS X Server on an iMac to share its files over a network.
I can access the files fine, but if I try and search the shared folders from another Mac on the network it yields no results.
How can I get search to work as well as it does on the files on local disks.

Answer 1

Spotlight searching of shared volumes works for me using OS X 10.10.3 Server and OS X 10.10.3 client, as follows:
If I use Spotlight to search for some content "Aaron Aardvark" the file that contains this text does not seem to show up in the immediate results, but if I select "Show All in Finder" and switch from "This Mac" to "Shared" the file "untitled text.txt" that contains it is listed.
In the past Spotlight was responsible for bringing servers to their knees, so I suspect that the above two-step process is a way of limiting server searches to cases where it is actually required.
Server 4.1 (OS X 10.10.3) seems to add the extended attributes needed to allow Spotlight to index sharepoints:
     test_server3:~ admin$ ls -el /Volumes/Server\ 3\ Users/
     total 0
     drwxr-xr-x+ 4 admin  staff  136 30 Apr 17:02 Server 3 Users
      0: user:_spotlight inherited allow list,search,file_inherit,directory_inherit
     test_server3:~ admin$
but in the past, e.g. Snow Leopard server, you could choose whether or not these attributes were set or not. IIRC  Snow Leopard clients would always include server volumes in Spotlight searches, causing significant slow-downs on the client, so a lot of sysadmins, myself included, chose not to enable it.
C.