Unable to search network drives with Lion...

All this talk of Easyfind is crazy (with all due respect for the posters). It is not easy to use and is much, much slower than Spotlight. It is little better than a kludge workaround for something that should not even be an issue! I am just sickened by this action by Apple. I am the sole Mac user in a law practice and the fact that I can no longer find documents on our server generates nothing but surprise or disdain for my Mac preference. Apple needs to get this fixed, whatever it takes.

Has anyone contacted AppleCare Enterprise support? I'm out of warranty on my 10.6.8 XServe, but I've had this issue for a few years, prior to Lion (this server isn't on Lion yet).

I've used EasyFind as a slower but simple substitute since then. It is adequate and can't beat the cost but I mean searching a file server is a basic server function. THIS SHOULD WORK OUT OF THE BOX in OS X Server. Weak.

It seems the index gets deleted or becomes unsearchable.

LostAccount wrote:

Yo Mojo

Who cares about the competition.

Apple certainly does not.

FWIW, here's what I received from Apple after I filed this as a bug:

"After further investigation it has been determined that this is a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering. This issue has been filed in our bug database under the original Bug ID# 10990537.

A feature regression is always unusual in IT, there must be a serious problem behind it. Unfortunately, Apple tends to be (too) secretive about stuff like that.

Hi thanks for chiming back.

OK, I have a small update. I will get to the bottom of this I am sure.

As I said in the past, I have mounted various local and remote servers, ftp and smb. I am using 10.7.3 client and merely connect to these storage locations and then use the Finder to search. Finder brings back no results.

I tried 4 machines all running the most up-to-date 10.7.3

I tried a 5th machin which has a longer installation history of 10.7.x than the other macs. It turns out that search worked from Finder as expected!!

I suspect, but I have to investigate further if mdworker (spotlight) is quietly indexing in the background and having not finished indexing, the Finder responds by not returning any search results. This is my hunch.

Does anyone have something to add to my comments?

Thanks

So Apple do acknowledge the issue! Does this mean it will be fixed in 10.7.4? Apparently the developer seeds don't mention any issues to fix which I find that unbelievable and disappointing. I have a NAS and a NTFS external drive (using Paragon NTFS for MAC) that I can't search using Spotlight. Other than that no complaint with Lion however file indexing/searching is a basic function of any OS that should work.

PF

hello all we are having the same problem with the spotlight search!

I searched now for several hours for a solution, and didn't find anything that works.

It's really embarrassing from apple that they offer and sell a new product which is worse than the old one and that they haven't managed it till now to get rid of this problem.

its like a slap in the face for a small business like ours who can't afford a big IT-department!

in school marks this is just a F ➖. 😠

greetings from germany

thomas

Hi Rick

I have to empathise with you. I have discovered something on my own with respect to the Finder and FTP servers.

I hate this solution but it's better than nothing, furthermore I have not tested this between restarts.

If you list the contents of the FTP server in list view (command-2), followed by select all and then command-right-click to display subdirectories (you may have to keep selelcting all and command-right-clicking). Eventually all the contents of the FTP server are listed.

Once this is achieved, Lion can suddenly search without issue, it's as though it has to 'learn' what is there first. Honestly though, I agree, it ***** and it's a devolution.

I suggest everyone call AppleCare and report it, it will get to engineering if they start getting enough calls on this one issue.

Rick one more comment if I may…

On one Lion mac here at work there is no issue!?! I am confident that this one mac has already gone through listing directory/subdirectory/subdirectory etc and this 'caches' the contents of the said FTP server. This is my only conclusion. I know that this ***** but it's better than nothing.

I implore everyone to call Apple on this. The mac should be going through directories and searching not us opening directories so they get cached (somewhere)

On a similiar point, I was going to buy Transmit, even they admitted that their own software has the same issue in Lion mind you.

Apple fix this!

I agree with calling up to put them to task about fixing this. I have to say however that they are well aware of the problem and that they should finally fix it.

I am not sure if you got it to work with ftp that it will work with smb. Their 1.0 implementation of smb 2.0 is simply buggy and broken. An ipad will connect to the same network via a $1.99 app and access the folders in miliseconds, the very same folders that the finder takes a few seconds to access, let alone search.

I am infuriated with apple that in 2012 they could be shipping computers with such serious networking issues.

I am also infuriated that instead of shifting their focus on this very serious usability issue, and getting it fixed by at least .4 of their os, they seem to either have ignored it or assigned too small a team to tackle it.

Apple you have no excuses in this, and it's a mockery to users and to your own status in the tech world, that this hasn't been solved by now. It's an issue that shouldn't have been there to begin with in OS X in 2012, and it's an embarassment that instead of pulling your weight and fixing it in a few weeks tops after it appeared you have let it drag on and on, affecting so many small businesses and private users at either their home or office mac use. I wonder if one of the itoys had a bug that gained much more media attention how long it would take you to issue a fix. It's shameful just because something that is affecting so many users isn't getting media attention that you decide it's a not priority to be resolved.

I understand your frustration because I am in the same boat.

I could test SMB here on my system. I am not running 10.7 due to this very issue, interestingly I did not test the search feature on our SMB servers and gosh they have a lot of directories. I could try and report back in the event that it helps you.

I know Apple reads this forum but only for moderation purposes not for reporting to engineering. It would be up to each of us who need this feature to contact them and report the issue. The nice thing about Apple is that if the Advisor on the other end of the phone is not able to resolve the issue they will have to escalate the issue to their engineering team and you will get a responce.

It's up to us to contact them, if there are enough of us reporting this they will need to address it. I do agree with your evaluation of this techincal shortcoming and your frustration.

Regards

LostAccount if you have read this topic and many other like it you would know that several people have in fact reported it to apple, and their resposne is never encouraging. They blame 3rd party products or refuse to acknowledge it, or drop into the black hole of apples silence. As a vendor they sure know hwo to alienate there cusotmer base.

Fully agree unfortunately.

Are there any developers reading this? Will OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) fix this issue?

Actually, EasyFind is great if you leave it alone... I mean, it searches and searches and finds stuff. But if I want to stop it in a middle of its searching, it just won't react to the clicking on the stop-searching "x". I have to literally kill the process with "Force Quit". Although this is rare, it is very annoying...

If you want to start a new search in EasyFind and there's already one running, you can also just open a new search window. Inelegant, sure, but it works, and you don't have to force quit anything.

Evan

Thank you. 🙂

Of course, you are perfectly right. I am too much of an perfectionist. I do not like processes running in the background taking CPU share and network bandwidth without actually getting me anywhere.

Coming back to the orginal topic/thread...

Is it possible to map/mount the smb network drive and putting it into the fstab and then trying to index it with Spotlight? If Spotlight or even OS X forgets or does not even notice that the volume is external, maybe Spotlight (mdworker) may actually index it. I tried this a little bit but got stuck figuring out the UUID of the external drive.... any ideas/hints?

Another idea that came up before is to use the smb of macports. Did anyone try that already?

yeap smb of macports has been tried and it worked, although I am not 100% sure it fixed the search issue too. You might want to google it, I would post a thread here from other forums, but I think it's against policy.

I am very disapointed with apple for still not addressing this in .4 of devs preview of lion. I am sick and tired of them offloading the problem on third party vendors.

Their smb 2 protocol has to be back compatible with most standard office or small business smb networks. And it simply isn't.

They are not what they used to be 10 years ago when what with their more limited resources they could (sort of) justify dropping compatibilities. This whole problem was created when with the new terms of the samba gpl 3 licence apple had to stop using the open source community reversed engineered samba and had to write their own 2.0 smb code.

We are not going to ask our employers or the various offices and institutions whose networks we access all the time to change their whole network infrastructure so the world's richest tech company with 92% profit increase in this quarter can get away with not hiring a couple of people and assign them to write a bunch of lines of code. If they want to keep selling iphones to soccer moms they had better hire some programmers for OS X as well instead of shifting their already small teams between development of iOS and OS X.

It's high time they got all this into their thick sculls. I am not prepared to spend more of my valuable time to go via the macports route. I am not going to be doing their work for them for what should be out of the box functionality for any modern OS.