• Mac OS X,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    Reindex Spotlight from the Command Line

    Spotlight is really a simple tool. Spotlight consists of mds, a command that is the metadata server, mdworker, the pawn that mds sends to scan objects and index them and then the three command lines of mdutil (manage the indexes), mdls (list metadata of an object) and mdfind, which as the name implies, finds things. All of this is used to keep a database called .store.db nested under .Spotlight-V100 at the root of each volume that’s been indexed. To reindex Spotlight from the command line, we’ll use mdutil. From a command prompt, enter the following to index your boot volume. sudo mdutil -E / Or an external drive named krypted:…

  • Xsan

    Enabling Spotlight for Xsan

    Spotlight has had a pretty checkered past with Xsan. But things are looking a little better and if you want to try enabling it again, once you’ve fully updated to 2.2 you can do so without too much fanfare. Simply locate the config file for the name of the volume you wish to enable spotlight for, which is in /Library/FileSystems/Xsan/config and is named with the name of the volume followed by a .cfg file extension. Once located, open the file in your favorite text editor (ie – pico, vi, etc). Then, locate the entry for EnableSpotlight, which should be set to No. Change the No to a Yes. You can…