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

As Jurpl said, some specialized software tools run only with a special OS and sometimes even with only a certain SP.

We have exactly this situation where different workstations are dedicated to a special software tool/package. As soon as you specialize there are only a handful of tools available in the world or only one or two the organization can actually afford.

We recently had to cancel a software package and its maintenance contract, because the software company tripled the cost per user license and reduced the number of modules within this package... This is not uncommon... but also gets us off-topic.

After everything I read and saw elsewhere and in this very forum discussion, I come to the conclusion that Apple considers this as a security feature and leaves it up to 3rd parties to provide a search tool (and not a solution... since there is no problem from their point of view).

There seem to be some people, who can Finder-search Win7 SMB network shares...:

https://discussions.apple.com/message/17976824#17976824

Strange world... ;-)

Wouldn't surprise me if those users have Parallels installed, as it includes MacFuse

I have Parallels 6... and I cannot search any SMB volume...

That's the set up we are using and it does not work. I.E. Lion iMacs will not search Lion Mac Mini server. It simply does not work. Neither does iCloud bookmark sync (but that's another thread).

Fugu Agency wrote:

 

That's the set up we are using and it does not work. I.E. Lion iMacs will not search Lion Mac Mini server. It simply does not work. Neither does iCloud bookmark sync (but that's another thread).

Spotlight doesn't work on network home folders. That's one of the feature regressions in Lion, but as I posted before, this has been identified as a bug by Apple.

If your iMac uses local home folders, i.e. you mount a remote share from your Mini server manually in the finder, then you should be able to do a spotlight search in a finder window. If it doesn't, on the iMac check the output of "mdutil -sav". There should be a line for your Mac Mini server that looks similar to this

/Volumes/MyMacMini:

          Server search enabled.

If it says so, but doesn't find anything, check the ACLs for the _spotlight user on the server share. This can happen after a regular Lion install is upgraded to Lion Server, although it shouldn't.

Thanks a lot, Mojo. I'll give that a go on Monday.

I'm having similar problems, but with AFP shares from an older OS X Server. I have:-

1 OS X Server 10.4 tiger, with an AFP shared volume

2 OS X 10.7 lion Mac Pro clients

2 OS X 10.4 tiger G4 clients

The 10.4 clients can search the 10.4 server share just fine, the new 10.7 clients cannot at all.

I've tried deleting the .Spotlight-V100 folder, and using mdutil to disable and re-enable indexing on the shared volume. Interestingly, the lion clients will let me enable indexing (reports as enabled in the mdutil -s status), but won't let me publish the index to the volume (mdutil -p gets error: "datastore publishing not implemented"). When I try to search the volume, I get an error showing in the client's console "mds: ERROR: _MDSChannelInitForAFP: AFPSendSpotLightRPC failed".

Out of curiosity, I set up a shared volume on one of the lion machines. These could be indexed and searched no problem. When I did "mdutil -i on /Volumes/Testshare" then did a "mdutil -s" I found something interesting. Where the 10.4 share reported only "indexing enabled" the 10.7 share reported something like "indexing and searching enabled".

So firstly, it looks to me like Spotlight in 10.7 doesn't work on AFP shares from 10.4.

And secondly (though a more tentative hypothesis) from the nature of that "SpotLightRPC failed" error message, I suspect the way spotlight is set up in 10.7 is that it makes an RPC (remote procedure call) on the server's own spotlight service, relying on the server to maintain it's own index, but that 10.4's spotlight service is not compatible with this.

Any suggestions or comments welcome - could be I'm missing something simple! But if not, I'm going to have to go 3rd party. We can't spend all day manually searching through a terabyte of data!

cheers, Mike

I have bought Synology DiskStation (NAS) today. It contains option to "enable indexing" for the shares and the file search using spotlight works!! The NAS runs Linux and Samba. So apparently it is possible to make it work on other devices/servers. But how??

I tried the following procedure in terminal on a share from server where the spotlight did not work:

mdutil /Volumes/shareName -i on

To turn the index on. Then I run:

cd /Volumes

mdimport -Vp ./shareName

Spotlight now finds all files I ask for! Please, could you try this to confirm that it's the way to go? Maybe I had just pure luck or maybe it will not work always. I did not try yet what happes if a new file is added. Does it appear in the index automatically?

Btw, I run OS X 10.7.4

I have 10.7.4 as well and can confirm this to work on my MBP.

It appears persistent, since it still worked after a reboot.

Just ***** that I have t do this for every "share".

Side note: on all my Mac's it appears that SMB's are much more responsive than AFP shares?

The AFP servers are found much faster, but they are also slower.

SMB servers appear in the finder at random - no idea why it is so much slower in finding these servers (Bonjour?).

But clicking through the SMB's is much faster.

Edit:

After mounting all network volumes try:

mdutil -i on -a

This will enable indexing on all mounted volumes.

Message was edited by: Hans Luijten Added mdutil -i on -a tip.

pepa_u wrote:

 

I tried the following procedure in terminal on a share from server where the spotlight did not work:

 

mdutil /Volumes/shareName -i on

 

To turn the index on. Then I run:

 

cd /Volumes

mdimport -Vp ./shareName

 

Spotlight now finds all files I ask for! Please, could you try this to confirm that it's the way to go? Maybe I had just pure luck or maybe it will not work always. I did not try yet what happes if a new file is added. Does it appear in the index automatically?

 

Btw, I run OS X 10.7.4

Nice find! Sadly, pretty useless in practice unless your share remains static. While this command does indeed create a spotlight index and one could think, a quick crontab entry would fix all of our problems, it doesn't, because every run of the command scans the whole share all over again and puts an enormous load on both server and client while it does. Well, thanks anyway, at least people try.

That's indeed the bad news. As I see it, the good news is that it can work! As I mentioned before, with the new NAS I bought it works even without this "excercise" in terminal. This I tried only with the old NAS I have. Therefore, now the question is: is there any open source/free plugin for Samba on linux that would create and update the index on the server? Apparently, Synology has something like that. I was looking on web, but I could not find anything (yet).

pepa_u wrote:

 

Please, could you try this to confirm that it's the way to go? Maybe I had just pure luck or maybe it will not work always. I did not try yet what happes if a new file is added. Does it appear in the index automatically?

 

Btw, I run OS X 10.7.4

I can confirm that this does not work for me with:

iMac(s) 10.7.4

MacMini server 10.7.4

Nice one pepa_u - this seems to have resolved my problem with AFP shares. The database even appears to survive a reboot/remount, and kept track of new additions, so let's hope it holds! I was a bit surprised that it wouldn't let me import when I was logged in as root - you seem to need to do it in the normal user account (I'm so used to doing everything as root in the terminal!). Presumably each local user manages their own metadata?