Unable to search network drives with Lion...

For me, the problem wasn't brought about by the Lion upgrade, it only started weeks after I upgraded. Before that, Spotlight worked fine on iMac/D-Link DNS-323.

I also have a MacBook Air running Lion and on that machine Spotlight can find files on the very same NAS just fine.

Talked to a tech yesterday. That feature(searching network drives) was taken out of Lion. No reason given. You will have to use a third party solution. I have alreay shut my macbook down, but i believe the app has some sort of squirell icon.

Whatever.

Point being, no native ability. Gotta go third party. I honestly would NOT have purchased my mac if I had known this...my file server at home is not mac. No other unit at home is mac.

Perhaps the idea is to encourage users to buy/build mac servers for the home? I dunno...

Hi... the thread is getting long and going in circles now 😉

Well, just to resume:

There are EasyFind and FoxTrot. The latter is like Spotlight and has an index file. Very fast "but" commercial. EasyFind is free and searches on demand and has no index file, which can take very long for big external drives or sub-optimal connections.

When I talked to an Apple tech guy, who was up in the hierarchy, he told me it is the smb server (external drive etc..) not the client (Mac). The companies (incl. MS) who are making the server part of the smb software had been informed by Apple years ago that Apple will change their smb clients. Hence they were supposed to adapt ... but apparently didn't. Kinda... "Never change a winning team". Anyway, it seems that Apple will remain "stubborn" on this issue and waits for the other to follow and to update their smb software eventually... for the sake of security and smb licensing. Difficult to point fingers.

Thank you for the hints and publishing your test results!

From its web-page Magican (and Magican-File) looks more like a System & Disk Utility plus Finder and goes way beyond a simple search engine. A little bit of an overkill, but certainly a solution .... if it works fully with smb.

Magican File has worked for me consistently for the last month or so. I use a Western Digital MyBook World Edition II. Note that it is not index-based, so searching could be slow if you have a lot of files... But it finds... 🙂

I see. Thanks for the insight. So it is not so different than EasyFind. Strange, that EasyFind does not find everything....

The best solution is actually keeping your files in order 😉 Hard to do sometimes, though. Professionally, I have a ton of PDF files, which I have to search for information regularly. The only acceptable solution here is to have them all in a place where Spotlight can index them.

With NAS being able to far exceed storage of a HD in a laptop, "keeping yours files in order" and "in a place where spotlight can index" is not a helpful suggestion. I do keep "my files in order" but I do it on a NAS drive.. Why it has RAID redundancy and terrabytes of spaces. The fact that Lion can not do the most basic of functions, search a network drive does not imply you must somehow change your work practises. It means Lion is **** as is apple for making it so and refusing to fix it.

Thanks for the information from support.

If products like easyfind, findanyfiles etc.. can do a raw filesystem search, apple should not remove this option. They can easily do the same raw search in favour of a spolight index lookup when thier criteria are not met. The impact, performance of the search. They are welcome to take a hard line on advanced features with manufacturers, but cripling the user experience achieves what ? Just gives an OS worth naught. I dont see this is as breaking ground, rather a step backwards, and at the cost to the people who pay for apple.

If products like easyfind, findanyfiles etc.. can do a raw filesystem search, apple should not remove this option. They can easily do the same raw search in favour of a spolight index lookup when their criteria are not met.

Basically, I fully agree with you. Technically, everything seems to be right there. I do not have, however, the deep grasp of the OS to understand why Spotlight cannot use the same procedures like Foxtrot, EasyFind, Terminal "find"... I think as well that an official statement from Apple is long overdue rather than quotes from tech guys who somewhat get to feel the heat from the users.

Apple probably just wants us to buy Mac Minis with Lion Server etc... Hard to force my corporation to change their huge servers for some Mac users, though.

It indexes the network drive;

http://helpdeskgeek.com/windows-7/windows-7-file-search-indexing-options/

I still think that is a bug, no matter what some tech guy says. The reason for this:

1. The search field is visible but it does not work.

2. Filename search works partially, if folders are not nested deeply.

I see no reason why a change in the SMB protocol should stop spotlight from indexing.

All filenames are retrieved, otherwise listing a direcotry tree would not be possible.

So if the finder knows all filenames it should be easy to add them to the Spotlight index.

If the indexer knows filenames and paths, it can also index their content.

So the only thing I can imagine is that a change in the protocol causes some loss of speed during the 1st index.

Apple should give a clear statement on this.

Lion claims to be the most advanced OS. But any old Windows and Linux box does a better search job ...

-- Harald

yup. my cousin could not believe that there was a mac mini server. when he was working tech support for mac a mac server was major dough and built on a high-end mac system.

I explained that pc users could hobble a home server economically and that apple had to intro a solution that was cost effective as well. Espically with iTunes and the like. iCloud or no, most would prefer to store thier purchased items themselves....

Lion Server - 49.00

Windows Home Server - (was $149) 49.00 on Amazon.

Mac Mini - $600 with dual core i5, $1000 with Lion Server set up(quad i7, 4gb, dual 500gb hdd

HP Storageworks machine with Home Server - 389.99(dual core atom processor, 2gb, 1TB hdd)

Pick your poison. The pc has 3 open sata bays and both can be added to with external usb...I dig the i7 and the 4gb, but my current home server(running Windows Home Server) has a dual core core 2 chip and 2 gigs of ram and runs like a charm...go figure.

"..Apple has a secure solution and one that respects licensing constrains. Because of that they changed their smb interface/communication/client, etc..."

Can I take that to mean that Apple does not want to allow searches for items or on drives that they may interpret as being outside DRM and the like?

If so, wow.

I mean, wow.

Bishop234 wrote:

Can I take that to mean that Apple does not want to allow searches for items or on drives that they may interpret as being outside DRM and the like?

No. It is the old/previous smb client (a.k.a. "SAMBA") which was basically some type of open-source-based solution and whose license was not compatible with Lion anymore. This has been discussed in similar threads here and elsewhere. It has nothing to do with copyright protection or the like. It "only" concerns the actual software interface to the Windows-based network drive... as far as I understood.

Thanks for summarizing the options.

At home I only have Macs and Airport Extreme. No problem searching within this homogenous local network.

At work we have MS Exchange 2010 and some type of NAS, I do not know which. There I cannot search. This is a multi-thousand people entity, which officially supports OS X, Windows, and Linux. I submitted a ticket for the Spotlight issue on the NAS, but did not get any reply yet. My admin still uses SL 10.6.8. No issue for him, but he recognizes the problem.

Same issue. Previous PowerPC Powerbook could view and search all my WIndows Network drives - New Macbook Pro with Lion can view drives but just won't search them at all. Grrr...

I logged a complaint with Apple Support about this deficiency, but it seems this inability to search Network Drives is a "feature" and Spotlight was (allegedly) "not designed to search network drives". Nonsense. It worked fine before Lion. My ancient Windows desktop box will search the network drives but a supposedly state-of-the-art Mac just can't do it? How many of us need to complain before Apple starts listening to what users actually need?