No Spotlight for Network Homes

[Anonymous]

We’ve got a Tiger Server + Tiger Client environment with network homes. When a user is logged in to a network home and does a Spotlight query, no results are returned. Testing with a single unique word in a simple text document (with a .txt extension).

Where do we begin to look for a solution here — on the server or in the client? And what can we do to fix this?

Thanks.

[premiermac]

Just checked, and a limited test just crashes the Finder on a search with a Network Home user. It also doesn’t allow exclusions in System Preferences.

[Anonymous]

How are we mounting the homes? They’re not portable/mobile homes, if that’s what you mean — standard, plain vanilla network homes. Sorry if I’m not understanding the question.

[Anonymous]

Ah, no there is not! So these users were previously using local homes under Tiger. Since we dragged their local homes onto the server to make them portable, and since Finder stupidly doesn’t copy dot files when dragging, these would be missing.

It may be possible for us to rescue those, thanks very much for the tip.

Still, why doesn’t Spotlight create a new ~/.spotlight if one goes missing? Is there any way to force it to do so?

Thanks,
Scot

[maccanada]

man mdutil
man mdimport

should point you in the right direction…I’ve not had to use them in a network home situation, but they work fine whenever I’ve needed them.

[Justin Burns]

I’ve encountered this problem on our network since running the later betas of tiger. It appears that the mds process goes out of whack (out of memory errors in the logs) and will not index the network homes or (occasionally) anything at all… The simple fix is just to kill -HUP the mds process from terminal. I have to do this once in a while for my users and it always restores spotlight functionality within 5-10 seconds.

-justinb

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