Summary of spotlight indexing not working on shares

There are a number of archived discussions on this issue, none of which has a conclusive answer.

This post over at ironic sums up the problem nicely:

http://ironicsoftware.com/community/comments.php?DiscussionID=1752

Having wasted more than a few hours researching and testing I thought I'd share the results with others:

a)

There is no way of indexing an AFP-attached network drive [1] on OS 10.6 , however ordinary search works fine.

I tested on a new Suse/Netatalk server with 3 TB of archived information, and ordinary search by filename is quite fast even without the index.

b)

If indexing is turned on for a network volume, ordinary search will not work, as Spotlight will use a non-existing index.

If you have trouble searching (at all) on a network drive, turn indexing OFF for the volume in question:

Mount the network volume

Open a terminal session and type:

mdutil -i off /Volumes/"Your volume name"

c)

Do not waste time trying to manually build the index (mdimport) as suggested in a number of posts. For a huge drive it takes days, and the result is - nothing.

-Christian