Spotlight not working locally

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Level 1

26 points

Spotlight not working locally

I have upgraded two of my Xserves to Snow Leopard server from Tiger server and have found that Spotlight no longer works locally on the machines even though the Spotlight search window is available, I have seen reference to Spotlight server not being supported in SL server but has it been disabled completely? It still works in Snow Leopard desktop but not in server, or am I missing something? I always found it useful for searching the local machines.

iMac, G5 Dual 2.7, Macbook, Xserve, Mac Mini, Mac OS X (10.6.1), Media developer

Posted on Oct 24, 2009 6:09 AM

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Answer 1

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Strontium90

Level 5

4,803 points

Oct 24, 2009 6:49 PM in response to Ian Buck1

Have you checked the status of spotlight on the boot volume?

mdutil -s /

If enabled, maybe you need to purge and rebuild. You said this was an upgrade... Try

sudo mdutil -Ei off /

This will disable Spotlight on the boot volume and delete the index. Then

sudo mdutil -i on /

This will re-enable Spotlight on the boot volume and create a new index.

Tail your log file to look for errors. For complete details, read the mdutil man page (man mdutil).

Hope this helps

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Answer 2

Ian Buck1 Author

Level 1

26 points

Nov 10, 2009 3:00 AM in response to Strontium90

Thanks, that cured it, the problem was that the index file did not exist at all following the upgrade, this and some reporting issues from another server running mail confirms that the ever old issues of upgrading server are still there, always best to back up and do a clean install, which is what I will be doing from now on, thanks again.

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Answer 3

Nov 10, 2009 10:05 AM in response to Ian Buck1

I tried this, but something weird is happening:

- I logged in as admin and disabled Spotlight. The funny thing is that then it suddenly started working even though it was meant to have been disabled? I returned later and enabled spotlight again. Now when I log-in as a non-admin account I have the same problem as before - it says indexing and estimating remaining time, but nothing happens.

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Answer 4

Nov 11, 2009 7:26 AM in response to Ian Buck1

I have a similar problem.I recently restored a Retrospect backup to a new internal disk and updated to 10.5.8. Now Spotlight does not work at all -continually says it is 'estimating indexing time' (for three days at last count)
I have run Cocktail and all of the various mdutil commands suggested here and elsewhere but nothing helps.

Interestingly, I started up from an external disk and it also said 'estimating etc…' but after twenty minutes or so it finished and gave me Spotlight access to both the external startup disk and my internal disk. This external had never been connected to the iMac before so it must have been accessing some index which existed on the iMac internal disk - no way was it going to index a 250g drive in 30 minutes.

When I restart from the internal I am back to no Find capabilities and interminable 'estimating…', on both external and internal startup drive. Does this mean some corruption in the internal HD system? I have run Disk Warrior, Disk Utility etc and repaired permissions and files but still same problem

Roger

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