Unable to search network drives with Lion...

chaoskcw wrote:

Mojo66: if you actually read this forumn you would know its NOT limited to SMB and its a GENERAL issue with LION which effects ALL network storage INCLUDING apples own products.

Indeed. We're using a network of 5 iMacs (Lion), two Windows PCs and a Mac Mini Server (Lion) and none of the Macs can search the network. The two Windows PCs work fine.

It really is a bloody joke.

If it doesn't work for you then it's because you've set the Lion server to use SMB, not AFP.

"It works for me" doesn't add anything to resolve this very real bug. I'm sure I and others experiencing this bug are wholly able to discern whether the server has SMB and/or AFP enabled. The services are not mutually exclusive.

Let's not let this spiral in to an agrument and leave this as a thread for those ACTUALLY TRYING TO RESOLVE THIS BUG.

Thanks looter, but ignorance points to itself, and people who respond with such a depth of ignorance only show themselves up especialy when this thread and several others have loads of eveidence to the contrarry right in plain sight.

I am not sure what actions can be taken. Its been reported, logged, talked about on public forumns. It seems there is nothing that gets apples attention. Which leaves only one thing ... money. ...

True, the services are not mutually exclusive. But if your server offers both, you will see two shares in the left column of the Finder. If you happen to select the SMB one -- depicted by an old 4:3 screen, haha -- you won't have indexing. The AFP share looks like a 16:10 screen, btw.

One other thing that might confuse a few people: in order to be able to use Spotlight search (the magnigying glass in the upper right corner) on a network share, the share must support Spotlight Server, i.e. it needs to run OS X Server.

If the share doesn't support Spotlight Server, then it is still possible to search the share in Finder. And this is where the feature regression came in: Before Lion, a Finder search would work an any type of share, SMB,AFP,FTP etc., and regardless of the hosting OS, because the Finder would do a regular ad-hoc search directly on the mounted file system, which used a lot of resources, whereas in Lion, the Finder search now only works reliably if the remote host is a Mac because the Finder doesn't do a search on file-system level anymore but uses the remote spotlight index.

Message was edited by: Mojo66

Mojo66 wrote:

The reason for this being is that the pre-Lion Finder didn't use an index, it would just scan the remote file system, hence hogging lots of resources. And that's what Apple doen't support anymore.

SL/SL Server did use spotlight indexing.

Thanks for quoting me out of context. If you read the whole message, you'll find that the quoted text referred to instances when the remote share does not support spotlight indexing.

In other words, there was never a feature regression between OS X and OS X Server.

I have to correct myself slightly.

Mojo66 wrote:

whereas in Lion, the Finder search now only works reliably if the remote host is a Mac because the Finder doesn't do a search on file-system level anymore but uses the remote spotlight index.

It seems that lost account found a way to bring back part of the old behaviour, i.e. brute-force scanning of the mounted file system, although -- at least on my end-- only with very limited success.

I agree, it is dissapointing to see Apple remove a feature that other OS offer out of the box. But in this case, I think complaining is futile. It has been Apple's strategy before that in cases like that, they'd rely on 3rd party developers to bring the functionality back in.

What bothers me more are feature regressions towards making OS X more like iOS, because that looks to be Apple's future strategy. They probably moved a lot of developers from OS X to iOS in 2006 in order to get functionality into iOS quickly, and, given current market development (iOS sales +151%, OS X sales +7%), decided to keep them with iOS. I read that the Mac would never go away as long as Steve Jobs lived because the Mac was his "baby". We know that Tim Cook is more of an economist. Maybe we'll soon have no Macs anymore.

@Mojo here we go again with your condescending replies... Smb shares on Linux and/or Windows servers are INDUSTRY STANDARDS apple has to find a way to support them because businesses and major organizations won't support afp any time soon if ever. (and its not like apple is helping them switch to it by disconiuing xserve and putting so little work in their server products...) How hard is for you to get this? No one is asking them to support ntfs out of the box, although it would be nice if they didn't break ntfs compatibility with third party free software with lion and had everyone paying for it now. Apple computers interface with STANDARD NETWORKING protocols and they are OBLIGED to support them. They know as much because they put an (apparently sub par) team together to implement SMb 2.0 after Stalman told them to take a hike with the fos version and gpl 3. The richest company in the world just hasn't bothered to find ANY solution to enable searching functionality as well. The technological infrastructure of billions of people can't change overnight because apple demand that companies run their servers on **** Mac mini with afp.

Let me ask you something btw? Is apple putting food on your table? What do you have to come here and defend the richest company in the world for not offering basic functionality to users paying at 40 and 50% margins to get their macs. Why do you have to come here and add insult to injury to users having to suffer through this serious compromise in daily os functionality? Don't you understand from an emotional quotient perspective how incredibly infuriating this is? To have you come here while our problem remains unresolved and read your condescending posts about not getting our 500+ workplaces to switch to afp? Get a clue dude.

My - soon to be former - network administrator is himself a Mac user but has not changed to Lion yet and stays with SL for now. He had told me once the following:

I think a very simple trick will solve your problem:

- Copy all NAS data in a folder on the Mac,

- Synchronize it with rsync to the NAS

If you want GUI, use arrsync

http://arrsync.sourceforge.net/

Because all your data are on the Mac, Spotlight works well.

And because you sync the data to the NAS, you have a perfect backup.

Our administrator is a very capable and competent person. If there would be a simple solution on the server side he would have implented it.

This is all beyond my understanding of networking.

@applesuper: SMB is not an industry standard. It's a proprietary network protocol that was reverse engineered by a few very clever people and later Microsoft was ordered by court to release documentation to competitors for a fee of $20k. Then two things came together, a) Apple couldn't bundle their implementation of Samba with OS X anymore, and b) lots of resources inside Apple were pulled from the OS X team into the iOS team.

Because of b) there have been feature regressions in Lion, and there will be more in 10.8. The only thing I'm saying is: with Apple focussing on iOS, I'm all against the few remaining OS X devs waisting their time in trying to implement a competitors screwed technology. I bought a Mac because I want innovation. And not Windows cash cow monopoly stagnation. OS X doesn't get any better from being more Windows compatible. It just helps Microsoft to stretch the time before their empire collapses, like every empire/monopoly has before in history. With the iPhone and iPad being so extremelt successful, we'll see Apple's garden walls becoming higher and higher. Why would the biggest company in the world want to be compatible to a smaller company that is bound to fail anyway? Apple is dominating the mobile market with the iPhone and the iPad. That's where they see their future. And that's where Microsoft fails. Hence I'm all with them to not waste resources into being retro-compatible to a dying dinosaur. Desktop computers are an anachronism. And hence Windows will be an anachronism soon too. Maybe even OS X, now that Jobs is dead.

Hi Mojo66 and applesuper,

I tend to agree with both of you ;-) Even though Apple does not like to support "old" stuff and environments, we depend on certain compatibilities and interfaces at our work place... otherwise our IT departments will have even more reasons to kick out Macs.

I had to installed Parallels with both Win7-64 and WinXP-SP3 just to be able to run the software provided by my employer.

It is one thing to understand or comprehend, why things are the way they are, and it is another thing to live with them and to find workarounds.

This blog helped all of us to understand or at least to get a glimpse on the "political/corporate" background of this issue, but we all want to have a solution without taking sides - at least I don't care who'll fix it, MS or Apple... or anybody else...

macobs30 wrote:

I had to installed Parallels with both Win7-64 and WinXP-SP3 just to be able to run the software provided by my employer.

In order to run your employer's software, you have to have two different Windows versions installed? That's funny. Your employer must have a lot of money and a bad IT dept.

Mojo66 youre a student or so?

in lots of companies some older software is used. Not all of that software is compatible with windows 7 so it's perfectly normal to have some workstations to run on 2 or more os's.

For all the rest it's simple.

A search function is a basic thing for every OS that lion can't do that on a windows network share (worldwide market leader) is pathetic

As Jurpl said, some specialized software tools run only with a special OS and sometimes even with only a certain SP.

We have exactly this situation where different workstations are dedicated to a special software tool/package. As soon as you specialize there are only a handful of tools available in the world or only one or two the organization can actually afford.

We recently had to cancel a software package and its maintenance contract, because the software company tripled the cost per user license and reduced the number of modules within this package... This is not uncommon... but also gets us off-topic.

After everything I read and saw elsewhere and in this very forum discussion, I come to the conclusion that Apple considers this as a security feature and leaves it up to 3rd parties to provide a search tool (and not a solution... since there is no problem from their point of view).

Fugu Agency wrote:

That's the set up we are using and it does not work. I.E. Lion iMacs will not search Lion Mac Mini server. It simply does not work. Neither does iCloud bookmark sync (but that's another thread).

Spotlight doesn't work on network home folders. That's one of the feature regressions in Lion, but as I posted before, this has been identified as a bug by Apple.

If your iMac uses local home folders, i.e. you mount a remote share from your Mini server manually in the finder, then you should be able to do a spotlight search in a finder window. If it doesn't, on the iMac check the output of "mdutil -sav". There should be a line for your Mac Mini server that looks similar to this

/Volumes/MyMacMini:

Server search enabled.

If it says so, but doesn't find anything, check the ACLs for the _spotlight user on the server share. This can happen after a regular Lion install is upgraded to Lion Server, although it shouldn't.