Saturday, June 13, 2009
Breakfast: Spinach scramble. Spent the whole day working on Patrick's website and troubleshooting Mac problems—Time Machine and Spotlight. Patrick reported that Spotlight is not indexing the Music volume that is attached to my computer via USB hub built into an OWC MiniStack. I soon realized that my computer was not indexing the volume, either. There are a lot of web pages that say "I tried everything" findable on the web and Spotlight is still giving people trouble—that was true for me, too. However, after a restart, the Music volume appeared in the Spotlight Privacy exclusion list when before the restart it did not. I manually removed it from the exclusion list, and that fixed it for my computer. The share is AFP, not SMB. However, Patrick's computer still has the problem. "sudo mdutil -sav" reports that the Music volume has indexing enabled. "sudo mdutil -pv Music" reports "Error: datastore publishing not implemented" which sounds like it could be helpful but it's really not since Apple doesn't appear to publish information regarding "datastore publishing"—the only information on the web related to datastore publishing and Spotlight are experiences with the error message. I didn't keep track of my troubleshooting sessions, but in total it was probably several hours, and some of my recent Google searches were: ["cookies do not match" "no such file or directory"], [spotlight stores empty mac], [spotlight stores empty], [spotlight problem server], [spotlight problem], ["indexing and searching disabled"].