• Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    Troubleshoot Spotlight Indexing Issues Using mddiagnose

    Spotlight just kinda’ works. Except when it doesn’t. Which is luckily pretty rare, for the use cases that Spotlight was designed for. But when it doesn’t work, you have a few tools that I’ve highlighted over the years to help you out, including articles on shared volumes, manually indexing, disabling Spotlight, and a few others. But what if you need to go in more depth to isolate an issue? For this, Apple has provided us with a tool called mddiagnose, in /usr/bin. In the following command, we’ll run an mddiagnose to dump a bunch of system statistics that we can then look at. Here, we’ll do that to a folder…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  personal,  public speaking

    MacTech Spotlight – Fall 2012

    Looks like I’m on the back page of the latest issue of MacTech Magazine (see Table of Contents at http://www.mactech.com/issue-TOCs-2012). And it turns out I’m not there for the reason I usually adorn the back page of magazines; I’m fully clothed and for the most part it’s technical: I’m the MacTech Spotlight. If I keep this up, I’ll be able to keep my clothes on full time in the future. Not sure what will happen to my spot at Sunset and LaBrea now, though… Anyway, despite featuring me, MacTech is a great magazine. Where else can you find information on Adobe packaging, QuickLook development, building a Squid proxy, HTML5 and…

  • Mac OS X

    Spotlightish Finder

    When you search for files the Finder window with the results has what is known as the Path Bar. As you can see in the below image, the Path Bar allows you to click on any directory in the hierarchy up to the one you are on and open that directory in the Finder. By default, the Path Bar is only shown in a search result, but if you like it then you can see it in every Finder window. To enable this feature, create a boolean key in the com.apple.finder.plist with a value of yes. To do so, you can use the defaults command: defaults write com.apple.finder ShowPathBar -bool…

  • 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…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Xsan

    Hey Spotlight, Skip This Folder…

    Whether it’s an Xsan with a wacky mdworker thread, a regular old box trying to scan a whole bunch of files you want it to skip or even a directory that you want to keep private, you can tell Spotlight not to scan a specified folder on your system. Simply use the following command, with the working directory of the shell as whatever directory you want skipped: touch .metadata_never_index In other words, create a file called .metadata_never_index in a folder and Spotlight will skip it. This isn’t to say it skips subfolders…

  • Mac OS X

    Spotlight Keystrokes

    Spotlight has a nifty integration of keystrokes (or the Command keystroke at least).  Simply perform a search and then use the Command key in combination with an arrow to move and up and down in search results based on section rather than line item.  Additionally, that Command key can be used in conjunction with the Enter key so that when you open an item in the Spotlight results, it actually just displays the directory so you can then open the file in the Finder (and subsequently access other files in those directories as needed).

  • Mac OS X,  Xsan

    Mac OS X: Enable and Disable Spotlight

    To Disable Spotlight for Mac OS X you can stop the Spotlight processes from being invoked by launchd.  To do so use the following commands: launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.Spotlight.plist launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist To re-enable it you would simply load up your launchd processes again like so: launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.Spotlight.plist launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    Mac OS X Server: Spotlight

    When client systems need to search the server quickly you can enable Spotlight on the Share Points.  To enable this, open Server Admin -> File Sharing -> Share Points -> Click the Share Point in question -> Click Share Point -> Check the box for Enable Spotlight -> Click Save. Then have a nice long steak dinner.