Unable to search network drives with Lion...

I have many network drive and they all work.

Maybe you can check a few things

1. In system's preferences -> spotlight -> Privacy

check to be sure your network drive is not in it.

2. In activity Monitor

Check if mdworker and/or mds are running (could be a longer name - see link below)

It seems Lion need to re-index everything

if they are running it mean the indexing is not over yet.

if they are not running

an easy way to force sportlight to re-index is:

1. In system's preferences -> spotlight -> Privacy add the drive you want to re-index

2. Quit System's preferences

3. Logout of your sessions

4. Login again :-)

5. In system's preferences -> spotlight -> Privacy remove the drive you want to re-index

6. Wait.. a faily long time. You should see mdworker and/or mds running

Hope this help.

Process info

http://triviaware.com/macprocess/all#M

thanks Franco. When I tried to add an exception for the drive in spotlight, I selected the drived from the 'shared' list in the dialog, unfortunately the CHOOSE button remains grayed out.

Also, I checked the processes - mdworker is running but us using between 0 to 0.1%. I've had the mac on for a couple of days now so would expect that indexing would be completed by now.

In snow leopard, a search on a network drive in the "shared" area of the finder would show that the drive was being searched through the grayed out spinning asterisk but in lion there is no indication at all that a search is occurring.

They are both appearing as SMB drives.

One is a QNAP NAS and the other is a USB drive connected to a Netgear router (WNDR3700 v1). I've had no problems whatsover accessing the files and data, its just the searching that is a problem.

I just found this

http://www.qnap.com/download_description.asp?pl=1&p_mn=122&d_id=86669

but since you have the same problem on both drive, I doubt it will solve your problem.

could it be Firewall related or Little snitch type of control ?

You could also find the Command-line way to re-index the drive.

I'm having the same issue with the Finder in Lion not returning any results in a search over an SMB share even though there are clearly matching files present. I'm able to search an AFP share on my Lion Mac Mini with no problem.

The SMB share doesn't appear in the Spotlight Privacy settings. I tried running a manual reindex on it with mdutil but was told that indexing is disabled. So maybe a bug of some sort?

Funnily enough I did update the QNAP firmware 2 days ago but it didn't fix the issue. I've also disabled Little Snitch and Virusbarrier v6, still no joy.

When I tried running the mdutil command I got the following error:

Error: invalid path `/Volume/mediashare' - where mediashare is what is showing in the shared heading in the finder.

Have I entered the command incorrectly?

I've also tried accessing my Windows 7 share and am getting 'Connection: failed'. When I click on Connect As... it now just shows 'Connecting'.

Update: a reboot fixed the Wondows 7 connection issues but not the other problem.

Message was edited by: tomfromnewtown

Ok, was able to check the status of indexing. It is confirmed as being enabled on all drives. I also used Onyx to rebuild the spotlight index.

Problem still exists. Funnily enough, if I do a search within a network share folder for a folder name, the results appear, but only at the top level of that folder ie. the search will not look within folders on the drive.

Will try calling Apple support today to determine next steps.

I have tried the mdutil command and it worked fine on my network drive but the is an "s" at volume. It migght just be a transcript error when you wrote this message.

I can't wait ot heard the solution from Apple. I do not have SMB share but I help a lot of people and I will probably hace this problem one day :-)

How did you get on Tomfromnewtown?

I'm having the same problem. Can search locally on the HD but not network drive connected via SMB. Really not good.

Tried all of the above; forced re-index, Terminal command etc., to no avail.

Anyone else found a solution?

OK spent over an hour on the phone with tech support and they were unable to resolve with regular troubleshooting eg. rebuild spotlight index, add/remove shares from privacy options etc.

We identified that the issue is also affecting an NTFS USB hard drive connected directly to the Mac as well as the network shares.

A FAT32 drive connected was immediately indexed by Spotlight.

They are escalating the issue to an Engineer after having received a snapshot of my system state.

It would seem to be a network protocol issue.

I am rather annoyed with Apple as they seem to have changed the protocol without making this clear.

My ReadyNAS duo is now little more than a brick with a fan.

Thanks Apple.

Very Interested in hearing any followup info from you tomfromnewtown. It's really hamstringing our graphics department not being able to easily search over 10,000 files without going to the server terminal.

I tried installing tools such as Thursby's Dave or ExtremeZ IPs to see if the ability to search an smb drive would return. I also tried mounting using CIFS or DFS url structures. In my case, searching did not come back.

My theory on this is that "Find" no longer finds raw filenames, it only searches metadata (which could contain the filename). Unfortunately, we cannot index any of our smb drives, so this metadata will never exist, and therefore will have no results when searching.

Using ReadyNAS duo (netgear) and their latest beta.

Through Foxtrot Pro had to start again - previous folder assignments just resulted in the indexer sitting tere and oing not very much. Reassigned the NAS folder (through AFP) and rebuilt the index.

The very latest version of Foxtrot Pro is, as I type, currently indexing the contents of the NAS folder.

So...something of a result.

Just to update...

Able to fully search (including content of files) using:

Latest version of Foxtrot Pro

Beta software for my ReadyNAS duo (sparc based)

Lion OS X

Through AFP

So...all is well.

Only issue now is to get Timecapsule to work which has so far defeated me (plus the print server on the ReadyNAS nolonger works :-(...ah well)