One frustrating shortcoming of accessing SMB shares from macOS is the default failure of directory indexing for file searching. You simply can’t use the normal Finder “Search” field to do anything. This makes it particularly tedious to interact with large SMB shares when you don’t know exactly where the files you want are located.

The solution at the link is simple, if obscure: select the fruit object from the available VFS Objects under the Advanced configuration of the share in question. Thanks to Spiceworks user David_CSG for dropping a hint about vfs_fruit that led me to this solution.

Edit: turns out that this doesn’t actually work. The current state of enabling SMB server-side indexing under FreeBSD appears to involve running Gnome Tracker. These instructions apparently work under FreeBSD Jail with the addition of devel/dconf dependency. iXsystems development stance is currently “Nope”. I might take a look at this and see whether the installation can be pared down; with any luck it should be possible to exclude metadata indexing components with the largest dependency footprint.