Unable to search network drives with Lion...

I think it's more than that... It is stil lsomething they changed from Snow Leoapard to Lion and that has been the case with network drives all along.. If the share isn AFP share, the search works fine. If it's and SMB share it does not. And one of the reasons we along with many others are having problems with SMB shares is because Apple decided to not use Samba any more and develep their own. We are seeing the fallout from that. For example Several vendors that depend on SMB shares (like Sonos) are still working on a fix because of the changes made. So, at least for me, I'm not doing anything new...But Apple did and the answer you were given about network drives was true in Snow leoapard but search worked. They have bugs and they need to fix them.. I wouldn't be surprised to see a bug release any day now.

Right... so here is the response from Apple...

I do apologize for the delay.

For this concern, since the iMac is updated to the latest Mac OS, 10.7, we recommend to update the firmware/software of the network router. Networked server shared drives (such as NASes) are expected to already have a spotlight index on them, created by the server, thus we need to ensure that all devices on the network are updated.

As for the NTFS external drive, I am currently looking into this further. As of now, since the connected drive is NTFS, the Mac will not have write access to it.

I'm not so impressed with their response. Does anyone have any comments to make before I reply to them?

To be honest we can go around all day trying to figure out what the problem is but it really is down to Apple to solve. If you bought a new car and that car didn't turn left, you wouldn't try to fix it, you'd expect the manufacturer to rectify the problem.

The way I see it it's simple, the product (Lion) is not fit-for-purpose. A search function is part of every day use within an OS of Lion's stature. If I'd paid the normal £99 odd for it I'd be asking for a refund but for £21, I'll live with it until a fix arrives. If they don't fix it then I'll roll back to Snow Leopard and lose even more trust in Apple.

I'm still waiting for my response. Having talked to 5 people on this I have found the content and quality of the responses vary heavily.

I'm concerned by your response. I have no illusions that Iomega, my NAS vendor, will include it's own Spotlight indexes. Why would they? They support AFP and that's it. It's silly for Apple to expect other vendors having Spotlight indexes. As for NTFS: I use MacFuse and Paragon and I'm not counting on Apple to support that, although it would certainly be a bonus. I'm not expecting native HFS+ from Microsoft either.

Otherwise I'm totally on the same page as Fugu Agency: I expect nothing less from Apple than to be able to search any volume it can read, regardless of it's connection protocol. Anything less than that is a crack in the fit-for-purpose state of Lion. Instead I now use the freeware tool EasyFind which was mentioned in this thread before.

As a side note: Lion has been my worst upgrade ever to the extent that I no longer regard it an upgrade, but rather a 'migration'. This searching thing is just one of my problems. If 10.7.1 does not bring Lion up to par with Snow Leopard I'm going back to Snow Leopard. iSync, Front Row, AFP, CalDAV, Java, Network Searching, and all those dramatic iOS "improvements" all add up to the worst Mac OS experience to date since System 7.5.1.

How hard would it be to reverse whatever they have done so that we could get this back - I mean the search experience with 10.6 was great, in Lion its just been torpedoed, sabotaged and bombed and now it's non existent!!!

Apple, I use my mac for work, not for play, this is important, its not something nice to have its a basic fundamental. At least you could have let me know that I would not be able to seach my network drives, then I could have saved myself the trouble and waited till it was sorted out.

I think that everyone must have got confused over there! Whats this "All my files" business anyway, I still haven't figured that out!

Apple if you are looking at this thread, we need to search.......

If you are also listening I still have not got the middle mouse button on my magic mouse yet.... How hard would that be to add in system prefs rather than through a third party app!

Now I am using a third party app to search!!!!!!!

Wow, we have really gone down hill.

Funny you should say that. I was so peeved about the magic mouse not having a middle mouse button that I did write a very nice email to Mr Jobs but I never got a reply.

I just couldn't understand it, Macs are a design tool, so much design software needs a middle mouse button.... Anyway maybe someone else could give it a go!

Like most posters here, network searching is still dead for me in 10.7.1. Both SMB and my iDisk (WebDAV). I asked the support guy to try AFP, because I can't connect to my NAS through AFP anymore since Lion changed AFP. According to the support guy he got results as expected. Note that he was searching a share on an Apple server, so very likely that also holds a Spotlight index. So I'm still not sure if searching will work once Iomega has updated its firmware for my NAS.

I have a hard time believing that dallasjef truly has network searching restored for him.

Hey guys, I'm in the same boat it seems. I have a simple set-up: an Apple Time Capsule with a hard drive connected to it. That's it. I really really want to index certain files on it when I use the mdls command on it but... you guessed it... it spits out nothing but the file name and some other stuff. I tried all of the usual commands to get the drive to index the files I want, but they did not work at all.

I was reading that Apple disabled this feature because network drives have been exploited this way. However, I own all of my equipment (and monitor it), and simply need to access file metadata. I don't feel as though I should go the third-party route to find my information, especially because I am scripting and need to make certain parts of my code work universally. How can this feature be broken? I just don't understand the logic behind it.

For testing purposes, I threw a file on the top level of my networked drive and tried to access its metadata (after mdutil and the like). It worked, but no others undearneath of it did. It's a only shame for me, but a work-related nightmare for the rest of you.

Hi, with all due respect, I cannot imagine why anybody that really was interested in searching would use Spotlight at all, I have it disabled on all but 2 Macs where I only use it to try to help with all it's problems. 😉

And BTW, NAS drives are for the birds, just wait for a bit of corruption to occur then try to fix it! 😟

This is a problem that effects general searching through an open window. Whether that is related to spotlight or not I'm not sure. The issue effects EVERY search within an SMB share.

This impacts business because we have thousands of files within windows servers in which we perform numerous searches per day.

EasyFind is putting a band-aide on the issue, but it is not a "Fix."

This is very frustrating - while i do appreacite EasyFind - band-aide is exactly what it is. I'm amazed more & more that a new os would be released with such a gapping hole.

For what its worth, i was also told by an apple "genius" to zap the PRAM, i tried not to laugh right into the phone, but did ask to speak to someone else - the senior "genius" told me i needed to take it up with my IT guy. Right....

Laughably, our IT guy upgraded all the PCs in our company & the server - our old g4s were not 100% compatible, thus the game was on for upgrading our Macs & now, we have THIS issue, on top of our new iMacs being shipped with Lion, 2 days before it was released to the public. At least there's EasyFind. Surely to goodness Apple is addressing this. Still shocked at the descision to do away with the samba... i just don't get it.

It's not like they can't make some special settings for these drives, like calling one computer the "owner", making it responsible for writing in the indexes in (or whatever -- Apple is great at problem solving). I just don't see why I would have to buy a Lion server machine just to manage one drive... it's silly. I sure hope that they are working on a fix. I'll be honest and say that this is a small bump in an otherwise decent OS, but c'mon: don't have spotlight at all if it only works half of the time.

I got word yesterday from support that he was able to reproduce with a very simple setup. I got word today that "I write you to just confirm that I escalated the issue to engineering pending their response.".

It's somewhat off topic but I found out today that searching also does not work for Mail (other than From or To, and only when searching inside Mail.app, not from Spotlight in the Finder), Contacts, and Calendar events. It's currently under investigation as well. Rebuild of Spotlight index did not work, neither did sudo mdimport ~/Library/Mail, although the latter gave me a 20 minutes wait, and tons of errors on encodings, illegal ics formats, and Microsoft Offiice.mdimporter having the wrong architecture mach-o.

another problem . since i've updated to lion my shared hard disk (router thomson) is missed. i've a mbpro with bootcamp in windows 7 (just for pc's games)no problem. it's still there.. any help?

For Godd sake bring me back my old leopard...