How to get OS X Spotlight to search Andrew File System (AFS) volume?

Question

I'd like to have Spotlight index and search a mounted AFS volume (actually, just one folder on this volume).

I'm aware of this question about network volumes: How to get OS X to index my Network Volumes with Spotlight?

This didn't work for me (see details below). I don't have read/write access on most of the AFS volume except one folder that belongs to me, and I'm thinking maybe this is the problem? If so, how can I index the one folder that I have access to?

Details:

I ran:

mdutil /afs -i on

then confirmed that indexing was enabled with:

mdutil /afs -s

After this, Spotlight showed no signs of updating the index, so I went to: System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy.

I dragged the AFS volume into the list and removed it, to trigger re-indexing.

Spotlight briefly shows the message: "Indexing afs, estimating index time", along with a striped progress bar. After a few seconds, that disappears, and a proper progress bar doesn't appear.

I used both tricks from How to see what files spotlight is currently indexing, to see what files mdworker was touching, and none of them were in the AFS drive.

Answer 1

I'm sorry for sidestepping the question, but since I find Spotlight a P.I.A. most of the time, I use Quicksilver for this kind of thing. I have a couple of shared volumes on my network - - I log in to them, tell Quicksilver to catalog them (or any folders on them) and in a relatively short time QS knows every file/folder on them.

You can also limit the number of sub-levels QS will catalog to shorten indexing time, but I set it up to re-catalog every 10 minutes, and after the initial indexing time, I can access anything on these drives pretty much instantaneously.

It has a short learning curve, it's algorithmic AND it's free. I've been using it for years and wouldn't dream of doing without it.