Indexing a network drive with Spotlight

I have a Buffalo Terastation NAS and I'd like to know if there's a way of indexing that drive for spotlight use.

Also, if you're connected to another computer using tiger and you do a spotlight search, will it search the other computer as well?

Spotlight only works on the current computer you are on, I wanted to do what you are trying to do now and was told that it was impossible at least for now. That is the one thing that longhorn will have that tiger does not, hopefully leapard will have this new feature and you can spotlight multiple computers and network drives.

You can search the other mac over the network, but you'll need to use the Finder for that. Once you have the other mac mounted, select it in the sidebar and search for what you want in the Finder search field, and it should show you that it is searching in the Volume "other_mac" near the top, and then it will search the other mac.

For the external hard drive, Spotlight will search both your mac and the external hard drive on the fly. But I'm not sure, if you can manually tell your mac index the external HD in Tiger or I'm having a hard time finding it, I hope.

yes you can search the external drive if it is attached to your computer but not if it is network storage, unless like iWhat said, you use finder instead of spotlight. I to am having trouble finding how to index it in tiger.

I think that you could manually tell Panther to index the drive, but I no longer see that option in Tiger. It was usually in the "Get Info" area.

Here is how you do it

USE THE TERMINAL OPTION mdutil.
It has a switch, -i, to enable indexing on a volume. So I just went ahead as root (sudo bash) and ran:
sudo bash. (my network drive example is named "ldm" so replace ldm by your network drive name)
mdutil /Volumes/ldm -i on
Then I checked the status with
mdutil /Volumes/ldm -s
And, behold ... I got back the following:
/Volumes/ldm/:
Status: Indexing Enabled

A second later, the Spotlight Icon started pulsating. Half an hour later, it stopped. I went to a Finder window, typed a query, and selected the network volume ldm. To my delight, matches were coming back instantaneously on files deep down in the file hierarchy on that volume. I have not checked whether newly added files are indexed on the fly, too, and I do not know where the .Spotlight-V100 file is stored (not in the root of the volume in question it seems).

I thought that others may give it a try to confirm whether this is working as expected. The volume I tested this with was an AFP volume served via NETATALK (v. 2.0.2) by my Linux server (a x86 debian box). Unfortunately, it appears to fail with SAMBA. I have not checked NFS. One caveat: you must rerun the mdutil command each time the volume is mounted.

Hope it helps someone!
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Thanks!

Awesome! This helped!

sowattmusic said:

USE THE TERMINAL OPTION mdutil.
It has a switch, -i, to enable indexing on a volume. So I just went ahead as root (sudo bash) and ran:
sudo bash. (my network drive example is named "ldm" so replace ldm by your network drive name)
mdutil /Volumes/ldm -i on
Then I checked the status with
mdutil /Volumes/ldm -s
And, behold ... I got back the following:
/Volumes/ldm/:
Status: Indexing Enabled

A second later, the Spotlight Icon started pulsating. Half an hour later, it stopped. I went to a Finder window, typed a query, and selected the network volume ldm. To my delight, matches were coming back instantaneously on files deep down in the file hierarchy on that volume. I have not checked whether newly added files are indexed on the fly, too, and I do not know where the .Spotlight-V100 file is stored (not in the root of the volume in question it seems).

I thought that others may give it a try to confirm whether this is working as expected. The volume I tested this with was an AFP volume served via NETATALK (v. 2.0.2) by my Linux server (a x86 debian box). Unfortunately, it appears to fail with SAMBA. I have not checked NFS. One caveat: you must rerun the mdutil command each time the volume is mounted.

Hope it helps someone!
•

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