Lion breaks Spotlight searching

Apple disabled spotlight on AFP shares a long time ago - can't remember which OSX release, but this has nothing to do with Lion or the recent AFP update

Interesting - my 10.6.7 Mini returns spotlight search results on an AFP mounted share. Same share, same NAS, + Lion returns no results... I just did it then to confirm I'm not on crack...

James

[Edit] I actually called Apple about this as no search results is a pain for me. They tell me, it should work if the AFP share is on a local network - I'm escalated to Level 2. I'll report back with what I find.

My understanding is that the Netatalk team have been working on re-enabling Spotlight support for AFP shares in Netatalk 2.2. So if you have upgraded to one of the recent firmware releases (4.2.18 or 4.1.8, depending on NAS) then spotlight searching may work (See: http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.2/Rel ... beta4.html).

But for SL users with older versions of NAS firmware, this feature has been disabled for a long, long time

I have both SL and Lion running with 4.2.17 firmware and AFP searching is not supported

Hmm... very odd. I've never missed Spotlight Search results from my NV+ under 10.6 - it works for me. It's now running 4.1.8 but it was on 4.1.7 for ages. 100% - this worked for me without any special tweaks. It's only this one machine that's on Lion that it fails. As I mentioned, I've called Apple and will let you know what they say.

James

There are various workarounds published on the web - none of which have worked for me. Any chance you could have done something specific to re-enable spotlight searching? It's not a new issue so you could have tried to address this a long time ago

Example of others posting the same issue over 2 years ago: viewtopic.php?f=28&t=32859

Also Netatalk 2.2 - only just included in ReadyNAS firmware - specifically states as a new feature: "Support for fast AFP searches (CNID backend "dbd" only)"

no - bog standard install. I did a clean install on this machine when I upgraded it to 10.6 and since then, it's just system updates and nothing special. The first time I became aware of this is when it stopped working in Lion! Weird.

Just a thought: When you search under SL - do the results appear quickly? Even on a share containing a large quantity of data/files?

The issue I describe - and should have clarified - is that spotlight indexing has been disabled on AFP shares. You can still search from Finder, but without the index the search can take a long, long time - so long it may seem to not be working. It is the ability to index that enables fast searches as now supported with the latest netatalk release included in 4.1.8/4.2.18

That's an interesting point - you're right - the search results from SL aren't instant - so I assume that means it's scanning the share. So - Finder Searches are broken under Lion then!

I just got off the phone to Apple. Because it appears to be a regression, they're escalating to Engineering.

I agree - as a test I performed a search of a share on my NAS, purely looking for file names, just before posting my last comment

Under 10.6.7 the search took approximately half an hour to complete (share contains media @ ~2TB data)
Under 10.7 - the search never happens

Note this is searching against a 4.2.17 installation, and so this does appear to be specifically a Lion problem - not a NAS introduce problem

ReadyNAS NV running RAIDiator 4.1.8-T5 [1.00a043]

I have the SAME problem. Searching my ReadyNAS shares work fine in 10.6.x, but once I boot into 10.7, they don't work correctly.

Here are some specifics:

10.7 can find a file directly within a folder. It can even find a file if your 1 or 2 levels out of that folder. But anything deeper, it doesn't seem to be able to find.

Not only that, but in 10.7 there is NO indicator that the search is running or has ended, so you are just left guessing as to what is going on...