Can you get mac to search a NAS by file contents?

[AvB]

Hi, I've set up my 210j NAS as a central file storage for our small office, but have struck the problem that Spotlight won't search it. The ability to quickly search hundreds of files to find ones with keywords is important for our work efficiency.I don't want to use ISCSI because we have multiple users accessing it all the time.

I've also tried using the DSM File Browser but it seems to only search for file names, not contents.

And if I search the drive in Finder, again I can only find file names, not contents.

Any suggestions? I can't survive without a Spotlight-speed search of the contents of my docs! It's like having your own Google!

 

[relax]

USE THE TERMINAL OPTION mdutil.
It has a switch, -i, to enable indexing on a volume. So I just went ahead as root (sudo bash) and ran:
sudo bash. (my network drive example is named "ldm" so replace ldm by your network drive name)
mdutil /Volumes/ldm -i on
Then I checked the status with
mdutil /Volumes/ldm -s
And, behold ... I got back the following:
/Volumes/ldm/:
Status: Indexing Enabled

A second later, the Spotlight Icon started pulsating. Half an hour later, it stopped. I went to a Finder window, typed a query, and selected the network volume ldm. To my delight, matches were coming back instantaneously on files deep down in the file hierarchy on that volume. I have not checked whether newly added files are indexed on the fly, too, and I do not know where the .Spotlight-V100 file is stored (not in the root of the volume in question it seems).

I thought that others may give it a try to confirm whether this is working as expected. The volume I tested this with was an AFP volume served via NETATALK (v. 2.0.2) by my Linux server (a x86 debian box). Unfortunately, it appears to fail with SAMBA. I have not checked NFS. One caveat: you must rerun the mdutil command each time the volume is mounted.

Hope it helps someone!

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050430233117572