Here at work we just switched to OS X, we have terrabytes worth of information, archived projects from the past, that we often take from to build current projects. We are in the process of re-organizing everything by ISBN # but in the mean time we search these archives with the finder dozens of times a day. The Archives are on a windows based server. For some reason OS 9 was able to index these archives, and OS X can not. Our company tech support says "you can't index/search a windows machine from OS X". I don't buy it, there has to be a configuration or a third party software. Please help, not just me, but an entire department. Thanks!
Searching windows server from OS X
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Go3iverson
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We went through a large migration of that nature recently. Wasn't much fun, but getting to OS X is well worth it! 
I'm gathering, if you just moved to OS X, that your using Panther, correct? Do you know what mechanism your using to connect to your Windows server (SMB or 'AFP')? What version of Windows is the server?
Any other issues that came up in your migration? I'm more than happy to help!
I'm gathering, if you just moved to OS X, that your using Panther, correct? Do you know what mechanism your using to connect to your Windows server (SMB or 'AFP')? What version of Windows is the server?
Any other issues that came up in your migration? I'm more than happy to help!
I'm a Graphic Designer so I'm sure how we are connecting to the server or what version it is. We are having many problems from fonts not working to not being able to print folder contents (which I solved with a third party software), the biggest problem so far is the searching thing, we are able to search it's just very slow and we have hard deadlines left and right.
I've also got an IT department struggling to understand the difficulties we're having with our OSX system and their Windows 2000 server. At times we can't overwrite files to the server because it says that the files already exist elsewhere. The only way round it so far is to delete the file from the server entirely and replace it with the file from my destop. We're also having problems with being able to load fonts copied over from the PC server. It seems to corrupt in transfer. The same files transferred via email to my machine work fine.
Go3iverson
Registered
I've done my primary work/consulting in environments like these for the last two years. There are lots of ways to try an fix up these issues, but a lot of them are going to be specific to your environmental requirements, what your IT deparment is willing to adjust and what products you can bring in to make your transition easier.
If you like, feel free to email me at miked_at_district13computing_dot_com (don't want spammers!) and I can see what I can do to help you out!
So, you can search Windows server with OS X client. A few tips. First, limit your search criteria. In find, tell it that you want to search a specific area and select only that share from the server, this will eliminate any other shares and any local volumes from the search. With that said, out of the box, its painfully slow. I was able to get results slightly faster an AFP connection to the Windows box, but it was still very slow.
I performed the same search on my Xserve G5 and was able to find my document, which was nested quite deep in my folders of the share, in about 5 seconds. The search feature itself began returning results of documents containing my key terms in under a second, as opposed to 45 seconds on EMC (Windows) hardware.
If you like, feel free to email me at miked_at_district13computing_dot_com (don't want spammers!) and I can see what I can do to help you out!
So, you can search Windows server with OS X client. A few tips. First, limit your search criteria. In find, tell it that you want to search a specific area and select only that share from the server, this will eliminate any other shares and any local volumes from the search. With that said, out of the box, its painfully slow. I was able to get results slightly faster an AFP connection to the Windows box, but it was still very slow.
I performed the same search on my Xserve G5 and was able to find my document, which was nested quite deep in my folders of the share, in about 5 seconds. The search feature itself began returning results of documents containing my key terms in under a second, as opposed to 45 seconds on EMC (Windows) hardware.