Unable to search network drives with Lion...

timewart Your post was helpful as a workaround, thank you.

I am currently running the personal version on our main system and it is working for searching. We are still limping along and look forward to having this work natively without having to use a 3rd party workaround.

Followed up with Apple, no word from the Engineer yet so I suspect there is no quick fix yet. In any case I tried Foxtrot and am now able to successfully search my network shares.

It is almost inconceivable that Apple could miss such a major bug before rolling out Lion.

I'm still hopeful of a fix and will post once I have another update.

I'd honestly be happy if just searching on filename worked. I looked at Foxtrot and it seems like taking a nuclear bomb to kill a mosquito. Plus it's the principle of the thing - I already paid for Lion, I shouldn't have to pay more to get back the functionality I had in SL.

I am having the same exact problem and it seems that afp is fine but it's the SMB network drives that are the issue. Nothing has changed except for the upgrade to Lion. I didn't have any problem with searching SMB drives in Snow Leoapard

Still no fix for this.

Seriously thinking of rolling back and asking for a refund. Search is, in my opinion, a major part of an OS. Apple + Quality in the same sentence is getting rare. This is rediculus, it should never have been released if it's simply not ready to use.

There's a free app in the App Store called 'EasyFind'. We're using that at the moment at it works fine, no indexing required and it's pretty quick. Working better than FoxTrot (here anyway).

It's not ideal but it's a temp-fix. Working through a, very large with many files, SMB share.

Thanks for the update Tom.

It seems that Apple really aren't taking this problem seriously at all, which is shocking when you take into account how many people are having the same issue.

Hopefully we'll get a fix soon enough.

Same problems here. It seems i just can't search from the root of the drive. I can perform a search if i delve into one of the folders though, though it obviously only then searches that particular folder...

One of my network volumes is Appleshare, and the others arer SMB. All acting the same here.

Spotlight needs a fix. I'm running Lion btw.

This problem has nothing to do with third party tools. I never used third party tools for search before Lion forced me too... Just so I could search for files on SMB network shares. It's a repeated problem that many people have experienced. My understanding is that Apple changed from using SAMBA to their own proporietary SMB implementation and that is why we are experiencing all these issues under Lion. It's not just causing us issue but a lot of vendors. I know Sonos has had issues with the SMB file shares, etc .... Apple needs to relase a fix already

Having the same problem here as well.

Working in an integrated environment (windows/mac) I need to have the ability to search network volumes regardless of file structure. Windows can do it, linux can do it, OSX used to be able to do it very well prior to Lion. This definitely is a very important issue. I am fine with Apple's forward thinking regarding their implementation but they shouldn't just chop out a key peice of functionality from the OS like this. Its very dissapointing.

I am too hoping for a point release that fixes this serious flaw in the operating system. We rely on OSX for work, its not a hobby or home activity. Please Apple engineers take this to heart and provide a fix!

I just got off the phone with Apple Support not expecting anything. However a PRAM reset did the trick for me. (Restart holding CMD+Opt+P+R and let the machine reboot three times and let go). After that search results returned.

Hope that helps someone else too.

Hmhm, indeed, but with a twist. I always get the same result (if it actually matches) three levels deep, although other matching documents exist in other directories. I can only get this one document whatever search argument. Top level documents are not returned ever.

It only matches by name before extension and yields no results based on extension or document type. Lost the ability to search inside network based documents.

Calling Apple again...

Finally got why I only this one document: Apple cheats by searching based on "recently opened documents". This one result was the one document I recently opened from that subfolder. I have tried by opening a few more. All documents I opened are now also found when search for a part of their file name.

So in short: the PRAM reset fixed the fact that nothing was found, but did not bring back network searching.

Still waiting in line for Apple. Lion is keeping them extremely busy...

Right...finally talked to someone, only to hear that Apple does not support networking problems like this. It was suggested that I should call Microsoft.

The fact that searching MobileMe has the same problem only led to the remark that this is handled by a different support service that is not reachable phone. The fact that the problem started exactly after going to Lion did not make any dent either.

Going to blow off steam somewhere now, while waiting for the new advisor for .Me support through chat.

Have been on the waiting list/phone/chat for about three hours since previous post. Result so far:

Mac OS X does not use Spotlight metadata for network volumes because it can't index those. Instead for network volumes the Finder acts as a front end for the Unix "find" command. This command works just fine for me on network volumes. (You may check yourself in the Terminal). Preliminary conclusion is that Lion has a bug in its connection to the "find" command. Currently pending confirmation of that hypothesis.