Q: Unable to search network drives with Lion...

A free program called iFileX will search network drives.

You can download it here: http://www.osxbytes.com/page3/index.html

That's a release note by apple for developers and i really hope this fix is related to smb network search but it's so generic explained...

Maybe some developer could tell something about this!

keep all fingers crossed!

Just tried it on 10.7.3...still a no go.

Yes, no search possible on SMB drives and even on 3rd party AFP connected drives (QNAP).

This is really disappointing.

-- Harald

Well, i guess this thread can be deleted at this time...

AFTER THREE LION UPDATES it's clear that Apple does not intend to fix this issue!

Maybe it's not Apple' fault (like i heard about the new smb license) but my Mac it's the only machine that is excluded from files search in ALL "non Apple" based network!

Very disappointed, maybe i should reinstall my fully funcional Leopard...

Like i wrote in this Thread: https://discussions.apple.com/message/16870672#16870672 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.

Yes it exists!

Another proof is that spotlight works well if I search a file in the FIRST LEVEL FOLDER (only files not if search a folder). It doesn't work only in sub-folders!

Really, i don't understand why Apple don't fix this after SEVEN months and THREE major Lion's update.

From a programmer's view:

There is no need to handle any SMB API.

Finder can display a network drive's folder. It knows the files, it can traverse the whole directory tree and write file contents to the Spotlight index database. Even without indexing search would be slow but possible.

So this cannot be a licensing issue, IT IS JUST A BUG and no one cares.

-- Harald

Same here,  SMB drives are not included in the Spotlight index. Finder cannot search my smb drives, either. This is because Finder is using the Spotlight index.

Any other search program or Terminal find search on-demand or make their own index file.  Thus the problem remains:  Spotlight does not include SMB directories, drives, etc. AND Apple keeps blaming the other SMB versions. 

My question to a programmer: it's possible to run spotlight in debug mode?

I really want to know why it doesn't work at this time!

Thanks tbhatch for the link, i use this programm and it works fine.

@bosconero: No debug mode. You can include an external drive into spotlight index with

sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/volume_name

Calling the volume status with

sudo mdutil -s /Volumes/volume_name

reports indexing is ON. But it definitely does nothing.

-- Harald

thx hschneider!

Maybe we will find the solution in the next OSX 10.8 code name DONKEY!

Last question: do you know what means "Address compatibility issues with Windows file sharing" as reported in lion 10.7.3 developer release?

Yes everyone keeps talking about the SMB and "licensing" of gpl3 but apple broke this for AFP too! Ala QNAP etc... Completly unacceptable. And the lack of response even more so.

Something is happening with spotlight/search in 10.7.3. I can actually search some directories (could search nothing before), but not all of them (all directories on the same server). And on those it does search, it will search multiple (all?) levels down into the directory, not just the top/root level as someone has said previously.

I do have read/write access priveledges to the directories so that is not the issue. In fact, I can search/access directories set up for other departments (for which I have access priveledges) but not the directory that contains my own (or anyone else's) user folder (even those for which I do have access priveledges). So, it seems there is an improvement and maybe it is just a setting for the individual server directories.

One other thing that is strange, is that although (from within an application), even though the Open dialog box is set to display "All Readable Files", it shows many files but many are grayed out, and I can actually click to select some of the grayed out files but not all of them. Also, within the application (Illustrator), I can not change the sort settings when clicking on the column headers.

I am hopeful as our IT guy investigates.