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I have a laptop with Debian 13 installed and a Synology NAS with an SMB share that holds music files. I have added a line to the /etc/fstab file to auto mount this share during startup. The line is as follows: //192.168.50.2/ShareFolder/CDs /home/chris/Music/CDs cifs credentials=/root/.cred,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

This successfully mounts the smb share. I can traverse the folder structure with the file manager and can locate the music files which are shown with a non zero size. The indexing service, localsearch, is configured to only search /home/chris/Music and do it recursively. But the indexing service does not index the files which are arranged as follows: /Music/CDs/ArtistName/AlbumName/SongFiles.

If I run the stat command on the CDs folder I get the following:

chris@debian:~/Music$ stat CDs File: CDs Size: 0 Blocks: 0 IO Block: 1048576 directory Device: 0,46 Inode: 65957 Links: 2 Access: (0755/drwxr-xr-x) Uid: ( 1000/ chris) Gid: ( 1000/ chris) Access: 2025-11-22 02:00:29.480271600 -0700 Modify: 2025-11-15 08:20:18.153656800 -0700 Change: 2025-11-15 08:20:18.153656800 -0700 Birth: 2019-04-26 21:56:59.558605200 -0700

It shows a size of 0 and blocks of 0. I do not understand what the IO Block is telling me. If I run the command find Music -empty it returns nothing i.e. no empty folders which I assume includes the subfolder CDs and its contents. localsearch status returns a count of 0 files and 2 folders. I think CDs is one of the folders counted. It also indicates that indexing is complete.
As a test Rhythmbox finds the music files and will play them but Gnome Music does not see them. My guess is that it uses localsearch indexing. How do I configure my mount command and/or configure localsearch so that the mounted smb share is indexed?

I looked at the gsettings for the tracker and found the following org.freedesktop.Tracker3.Extract max-bytes 1048576. The max-byte size is 1MB which is the same size as the IO Block size for the CDs folder (see output from stat CDs above). All the music files are much larger than 1 MB. Could it be that I need to increase the max-bytes number to be as big as the largest music file size. Thank you.

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    The name localsearch suggests that it only searches local (i.e. non-network) filesystems. I don't use it or have it installed, and the online docs for it doesn't mention any details of what, exactly, it indexes but you should check the config and see if there's a way to enable indexing and searching of remote filesystems. Maybe run localsearch index --add --recursive /home/chris/Music/CDs to try forcing it to index the CDs directory itself - it's possible that it may refuse to descend into network shares unless they're explicitly listed. Just a guess, I don't know or use the software. Commented 2 days ago
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    If this works, please write it up as an answer. You can accept it in a couple of days if nobody comes up with an answer you like more (yes, it's OK to answer your own question and accept it here on U&L) Commented 2 days ago
  • @cas LocalSearch seems to be the new name of tracker-miner, source Commented 2 days ago
  • Yeah, i ended up unpacking that .deb into a tmp directory just to look at the docs....which still didn't bother to mention whether it was for local filesystems only or not. If I had to guess, I'd guess that "local" means "local". But, you know, feature creep combined with gnome's problematic relationship with documentation and transparency and just rewriting everything every few years because it's more fun than fixing bugs means that all possibilities are on the table. Commented 2 days ago
  • BTW, i purged that crap back in its first incarnation when it was called beagle, before it got rewritten several times until it's current name of tinysparql. i have no use at all for content-based indexing or searching of my files, and certainly don't want to waste CPU power or IO bandwidth on it. That sort of crap is for the kind of people who just slop every file they have onto their desktop without any organisation. I use sensibly structured directories and meaningful filenames. Works for me (and has done since the early 1980s). YMMV. Commented 2 days ago

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Turns out I was making 3 errors. Here is a snippet of the original command in the /etc/fstab file.

//192.168.50.2/ShareFolder/CDs /home/chris/Music/CDs

Error 1: ShareFolder is the rsync folder. Do mount to this folder. Error 2: CDs on the NAS is a subfolder. Do mount from a subfolder. Error 3: CDs in /home/chris/Music is a subfolder. Do not mount to a subfolder.

Solution is as follows: On NAS: Create a top level folder. Copy files from Rsync subfolder to this new folder. Reindex the new folder.

On Debian computer: Delete all subfolders in Music folder. Modify /etc/fstab command line (shortened to illustrate solution). //IP_Address_Of_NAS/Newly_Created_Folder /home/chris/Music, Reboot

Localsearch now indexes all of the files.

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