Unable to search network drives with Lion...

Some of my iCal issues could be resolved on the Exchange Server side.... But the smb and spotlight issue remains.... So apparently they were unrelated. In the end the Apple support was right. It was not a Mac problem. As for the Spotlight/SMB issues, the admins say it is not their Exchange server, but yet another NAS server.... So the journey continues ;-)

You are right, of course. Sorry. I have the same issues with my professional PDF library. I can only copy part of it to the Spotlight-searchable drive.

Well, after talking with the Apple Tech guy (nobody from the frontline, though) for half an hour, I can understand their viewpoint. Apple has a secure solution and one that respects licensing constrains. Because of that they changed their smb interface/communication/client, etc a long time ago and informed the others in time. Only after that they introduced the new client in Lion. As stated above, the others need to follow.... Apple has always been a frontrunner with implementing new technology (iPhone, iPad, etc...). They take a hard stand here as well, which - unfortunately - makes our life very uncomfortable.

Like i wrote in this Thread: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3194502?answerId=16870672022#16870672022 it is possible to search with the terminal. So the functionallity exists. It is only impossible to search with the finder. I'm sad that apple don't show any reaction to this thread.

OK, that means that we have to report it more! However, I wrote to their feedback (http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html) already long time ago about this issue.

Not only that it does not work with SMB shares, it does not work with NTFS drives neither. I was discussing this with Paragon who wrote the NTFS driver that I use and they have no solution! Am I really the only one who is using NTFS disks under Mac and cannot search them??

My conclusion is that Apple has all these complaints on SMB share on NTFS drive and they cannot find them anymore :-D

I know that the omission of this feature is irritating, but it is not really that big a deal, as far as I can tell. Take one minute and download a free copy of EasyFind:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/easyfind/id411673888?mt=12

The app is fast, light, and flexible--arguably does a better job of searching remote severs than Spotlight ever did. Yes, it might add an extra ten seconds to your day, as you have to start up another app. And no, it's not as elegant as having search built right into the OS. But if the complaints are really related to utility--and not some weird sense of betrayal and wounded pride--EasyFind, mentioned many, many times on this thread, should really put them to bed.

I just don't understand why everybody is taking this issue so personally. I agree that it's a shortsighted omission that smacks of both carelessness and arrogance, but nothing is ever perfect. I am still confident, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that OSX + EasyFind is far preferable to any other option for me. Anybody who feels otherwise should vote with their proverbial feet/wallets.

Evan

I doubt that Apple is doing this to sell more Mac Mini servers. That would be ridiculous. I'm sure that the root problem is technical. Over the last few years I reported a handful of bugs and they all got fixed eventually. I didn't use the OS X feedback page, http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html however, but the developer bug reporter at https://developer.apple.com/bugreporter/. A (free) developer account is neccesary and I urge everyone to file a report there. Maybe read the best practices first.

Thought I'd bump this thread as I've got an identical problem.

Just splashed out on a 3TB Time Capsule so our six iMacs can Time Machine it and use the remaining space for archive storage. Discovered this week that all six iMacs get zero results when searching the drive now they're on Lion. Indexing is on according to Terminal.

I can use mdimport in the Terminal and once it's finished I get the search results I expect, but this is only useful until a reboot when the index (stored locally I assume) is destroyed. I've tried Terminal's publish facility but this doesn't push the index to the TC.

Interestingly if I connect via AFP I get ten results only, regardless of the query (ten PDFs, ten JPGs, etc). Bearing in mind the TC holds thousands of PDFs, the same ten PDFs appear in the results. Connecting via SMB yields zero results. There is no .Spotlight-V100 folder in the root directory of the TC either.

You'd think Apple would make their own drive searchable, would you not? I bought it because on upgrading to Lion we couldn't search the two Buffalo LinkStations I'd installed. Turns out I've still got the same problem. Why would Apple flog a network drive that cannot be searched by their own machines? The plan was to archive on to the TC and mirror it on a Buffalo as a backup. If we can't search either, we have no retrieval facility.

Tried EasyFind which is great. Might have to be a permanent fixture it seems.

Just wanna let you guys know that Forklift ( http://itunes.apple.com/en/app/forklift/id412448059?mt=12 is currently on sale in the Mac App Store, from €24 down to €0,79. Besides offering dual-pane views, FTP upload and a ton of other stuff, it also allows to choose between a Spotlight search and a direct file name search on a folder, which does work on a network share, too. It doesn't search for file content however.

Did this help?Go to the message, sign in, and reply .

I click on that link and it takes me to the sign in page. I sign in and it doesn't take me, as one might expect, to this discussion but to the main Discussions page. It's ridiculous too. Why doesn't the sign in take me to the very discussion I want to reply to?

I completely agree with you…

Your issue is peculiar alright

I am not sure which device you have but considering how little specifics I have other than the issue you report, I wonder if this article is relative or not. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4700 (Connecting to legacy AFP services)

Also, if possible, I would connect that device directly to your mac to ***** whether you can search when it's connected directly.

Also, you should perhaps try an FTP server or other SMB/AFP connection types to see if they work. It would be a good idea to isolate the issue by testing against other configurations.

As an FYI, I updated to 10.8.1 which yielded a restart and I continue to have no issues. My setup is a bunch of hard drives attached to a USB hub which is in turn connected to the USB port of an airport extreme which is extending an Airport Express's network.

I mounted my "Music" drive and searched for "abc". In a matter of seconds I got my results up on screen.

Please submit any further information here or contact AppleCare. If you purchased Mountain Lion remember that it enjoys 90 days of technical support from the date of purchase you purchased Mountain Lion on.

For the time being, you may want to try:

sudo mdutil -i off (the path to your NAS drive)

You can leave a space after the word 'off ' and then drag and drop the NAS drive icon into the terminal window to complete the path for you.

Then run:

sudo mdutil -i on (the path to your NAS drive)

I will be happy to help in anyway I can and I hope this helps.

Kind Regards

Well, actually, things went even worse with 10.7.5! Now Spotlight works only partly even on the local disk, because it is not able to index it in a reasonable time! Plus, they screwed up Time Machine. 😟

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4325327?answerId=19731431022#19731431022&ac_cid=op123456#19731431

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4324046

Everything we discuss here was reported many times...

It is a long thread - indeed. I should create a new one with just the answer and provide the link here or something.

Glad it worked.

You should find yourself rarely issuing that command.

Keep these in mind.

1 - Make sure indexing is 'on' for the SMB volume: sudo mdutil -i on path-to-smb-volume

2 - Since the index is stored locally on the client's volume, the SMB server MUST remount with exactly the same name each time or it can't pair up the server with the local index. In other words, if the server name changes or if it is a local SMB drive whose name you change the index won't pair up.

Hope this helps.

OK I created a new thread with just the answer … https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4693684

Has anyone tried SMBUp?

I was really hoping Mavericks would fix this with its theoretical SMB2 implementation, but it didn't...

I saw people were trying to use it to re-enable SMB file sharing, but wasn't sure if it would fix the search problem. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3208098?start=0&tstart=0 (File sharing thread discussing SMB/ scan to drive, SMBUp talk starts on page 3, and dev notes on p 4)

Alternately, has anyone tried MacPorts to install Samba? http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20120401160655922 (MacPorts install guide)

Both of these are in reference to Lion, but since they both essentially are just installing a protocol they may still work.

I would have to go through IT to get this enabled, so I would like to know if it works before I go try to wheedle my way into their hearts though lol. Anyone willing to try it out?

[eta] Also note that SMBUp is basically a front-end to do exactly the same install as the MacPorts version, without having to dl Xcode etc.

Hello MidiTime

In regard to the long answer and the last step on reindexing your Macintosh HD drive. Here is Apple's official response. Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes

Here are some additional documents that can be of help:

OS X Mountain Lion: Keywords to use in Spotlight searches

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2531 Mac Basics: Spotlight

Again, please chime back if there are issues.

Alex

I don't want to comment on your allegations. Instead I have a simple list of facts for you:

• on November 5, 1999 Microsoft was found guilty of monopoly abuse. Quote from the Judge: "Microsoft executives had "proved, time and time again, to be inaccurate, misleading, evasive, and transparently false. ... Microsoft is a company with an institutional disdain for both the truth and for rules of law that lesser entities must respect. It is also a company whose senior management is not averse to offering specious testimony to support spurious defenses to claims of its wrongdoing." They appealed, avoided to get broken up in two seperate OS and App companies and later, when the political climate changed (Clinton -> George W. Bush) reached a settlement to share documentation of APIs. "Andrew Chin, an antitrust law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who assisted Judge Jackson in drafting the findings of fact, wrote that the settlement gave Microsoft "a special antitrust immunity to license Windows and other 'platform software' under contractual terms that destroy freedom of competition. Microsoft now enjoys illegitimately acquired monopoly power in the market for Web browser software products."
• In March 2004, the EU ordered Microsoft to pay €497 million because of anti-competitive practices
• On 12 July 2006, the EU fined Microsoft for an additional €280.5 million
• On 27 February 2008, the EU fined Microsoft an additional €899 million

Quotes are from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Microsoft_competition_case and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft

This is one is also a nice read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation

My personal opinion is that every cent into Microsofts throat is one cent too much.

I know that this is completely off-topic, but I think it is important to know the criminal record of the competition.