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

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!

10.7.1 fixed my issues with searching SMB shares.

Does searching the network volume work for you?

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.

Yeah, I had forgotten I had moved the drive so now it is attached to a Mac Server, so it has a spotlight index ...

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 presume that we are no further forward with this and that Apple has still not fixed the issue?

Has anyone else, who was in discussion with Apple, had any joy?

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.".

No word back from engineering yet.  Seems to have submarined into a black hole, not so impressed with the lack of updates.

Same problem here. Lion 10.7.1 refuses to search SMB shares, and specifically enabling indexing on those volumes does not fix the problem.

—Andreas

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.