Unable to search network drives with Lion...

LostAccount wrote:

A reasonable amount of time is relative. How long have you waited and how much data is spotlight chewing threw?

Without knowing much more than what I quoted above, perhaps leave the mac on all night with only the Finder running.

Regards

Reasonable amount of time would be lets say a day, but it is not. It crunches for days and does not progress. I left mac running not only one night, but couple of...

LostAccount wrote:

Hello Pepa_u et all

If you are still facing issues, I would like to volunteer this information.

Re spotlight index to your local drive

1) Go to the spotlight system preferences and add your internal drive to the privacy tab

2) Now remove it from the privacy tab

-The two steps above causes spotlight to reindex your internal drive, which can help with time machine backups as well because backups rely on the index

Re spotlight index to your shared drives (hanging off extremes, SMB, FTP, AFP…)

1) Go to the spotlight system preferences and add your internal drive to the privacy tab

2) Now remove it from the privacy tab

3) Open terminal and type the command in step 2

4) sudo mdutil -i on path-to-volume (when it comes to the path-to-volume, simply mount your drive, add a space after the command noted here in step 2 followed by dragging and dropping your mounted drive to the terminal window)

3) You need to type in your administrator password, as you type there is no feedback. Press enter after typing your password of course.

In both cases above, if you click on the spotlight icon, you should see indexing going on. Please note, there may be a few seconds delay before you see the index progress bar appear.

If it does not index, repeat steps 1 and 2 for either scenario.

Small caveat:

Since the index is stored locally on your computer's local volume, the drive you are indexing, especially with network drives, the 'server' or remote volume MUST remount with exactly the same name each time or it won't pair up the server/remote volume with the local index.

PS, yes this has absolutely been reported to Apple. If anyone here is still having issues and you believe your issue is better looked at outside this thread I recommend creating a new post with your specific situation. Highlight specific details regarding your OS version, hardware and symptoms and if reproducible, point those out as well.

I hope this helps.

I all did these steps several times. It does not help.

pepa_u wrote:

It crunches for days and does not progress.

This means mdworker crashes while trying to index the content of a specific file. I bet €10 that it's an Office document. There are hundreds of how-to's on how to deal with this. My personal solution was to get rid of all Microsoft products and use just Apple Soft- and Hardware and Linux. Haven't had any problems since then. Whether this is Apple's or Microsoft's fault, or whether this is intentional, has been discussed in this thread at length. If you want trouble, or you're bored, run Office on a Mac, mount SMB shares on a Mac etc etc ad nauseum. My 2 cent.

No problems searching docs from MS Word:Mac 2011 on my local machine and my local network (MBP, iMac, external drives, airport extreme).

So why won't it do the same search/index in on the smb volumes? ... Back to square 1 ;-)

My 0.01888 CHF ;-)

Well, my new employer does not allow my - or better any - MBP on the MS-based network. So I cannot verify any new hints/suggestions/procedures anymore.

I'm not saying that when spotlight crashes while indexing, it is always because of an Office document. I'm just saying that I regard the probability so high to put a bet on it. If this was percepted as a 100% probabilty then I apologise.

Well, that could be the reason, but why it worked until I installed 10.7.5? Btw, there is many, many other people with the same problem after installing 10.7.5.

I am afraid I can't tell you why it worked until 10.7.5 was installed nor can I explain why a lot of people are having the same issue after installing 10.7.5. This is why it's always a good idea to backup before any update. In case something goes terribly wrong, you can always revert back from the backup 😀

I recommend you rebuild the spotlight index as per the steps I provided. In your case, it may be enough to simply add your drive to the spotlight privacy tab and a few seconds later remove it, forcing the spotlight index to rebuild itself.

I hope this helps…

LostAccount, thanks a lot for tryting to help. However, I tried all what you suggest a long time ago without any successes. I'm worry this time it's really Apple's fault and bug in their update 😟

It took me years to convince our IT guys to let me run a mac in our office. I was repeatedly told that it would not work with me saying that it would. Alas, my new MBP won't do something as simple as search a network drive. But I did find a solution: Run the search in my virtual windows 7 machine. It works flawlessly. I am starting understand why people are saying that Apple is more worried about ipods than computers.

I strongly encourage people who still have issues with unexpected behavior related to this thread to contact AppleCare and report the issue. Provide as much information as possible and tell them that you expect an answer on why your mac doesn't behave as expected on a network.

I don't know what else to offer. Remember, Mountain Lion has 90 days phone support from its date of purchase.

Regards

I've reported the issue and received the same response as everyone else. However, I've learned that my mac does behave as expected on a network. As Apple expects it to behave, not me.

Thanks for your suggestion but I don't think Apple will provide a fix to this due to its Techno-hubris.

I really hate this but i solved with the free utility EasyFind (you can find it in the App Store).

Hi,

from Terminal, type mdutil /Volumes/_yourshare_ -i on

Regards,

hc-amis

the result is "Indexing and searching disabled."

Any suggestions?

Following some advices I found on this post, I previously added some volumes in the spotlight privacy tab...so this is why terminal gave me the "Indexing and searching disabled." result.

Now I've removed those volumes from the privacy tab and repeated the "mdutil /Volumes/_yourshare_ -i on" command and now the result is "Indexing enabled".

In fact now the indexing seems to be working as i'm now able to search files....even if it is not flawless as before...

hc-amis thank you very very much!