How do I get menubar Spotlight (not Finder search) to show share point results on client machines?

Anyone?

Yeah, I noticed on my setup that when I create a new share point the server adds an ACL entry to the top level of the share giving permission to _spotlight. These ACL permissions are set to inherit to new files and directories created on the share, but are not propagated to existing files or directories. Spotlight also seems to reindex the entire disk each time a share point is added, at least on 10.7.3 server.

Interestingly, when I tried manually propagating the _spotlight ACL through all the files and directories on the share it didn’t made any difference to spotlight’s ability to index the share or serve that index up to the clients through Finder. Neither did it make a difference when I stripped the ACL entires away entirely. Maybe my standard permissions are sufficient for mdworker to access the directories and files? They’re drwxrwx— and -rw-rw——-- respectively. When I screen share the server and click on menubar spotlight, it yields all the expected results too, I guess because the RAID is a local disk as far as the server is concerned.

Actually, I think in my case at least, the shares and server and permissions are all working just fine. The Finder result proves that it does all work as it should. The problem, I think, boils down to where menubar spotlight is looking for results. It’s like it is stuck on the equivalent of the “this mac” setting on the Finder search bar. I’ve searched com.apple.spotlight.plist and others files for a way to change the default search parameters for menubar spotlight, but can’t find anything that looks even slightly right.

I just noticed something new. If one of my client machines stays connected to a share point for a long period (overnight for instance) and the client cycles through sleep and wake while connected, the results returned by Finder search does not reflect changes made to files on the share point after the sleep cycling event. It still returns results, just out of date results. For instance, after sleep, creating the file sample.txt on a share point and then using Finder to locate all shared files edited in the last day will not return sample.txt. Disconnecting and reconnecting does not fix the problem, neither does killing Finder, but rebooting the client fixes the problem immediately. That is, sample.txt will appears in the results right away.

Does anyone know if this is an mdworker issue on the client side? Any idea how to get up-to-date results without resorting to a reboot?

No solution yet unfortunately. I've upgraded my client machines to Mountain Lion and tried a few other tweaks, but no change to the results returned by menubar spotlight. My mini server is still running Lion Server, so perhaps the situation will improve when I upgrade that side of things. I still reckon it should simply be a matter of pointing menubar spotlight at the share point rather than the local drive, but I read somewhere that location is baked into the Spotlight app and cannot be changed.