Spotlight not working after enrollment

mcsoellner
New Contributor III

Hi everyone,

A little bit of background: my company is starting to enroll end users' devices into JAMF. We had a successful test pilot with our Technology department and any end users that volunteered to enroll before we went live. There were (and still) no search function problems in Spotlight, Finder, or Outlook.

After going to two more departments, I have been getting feedback that the user cannot search in Spotlight, Finder, or Outlook. In terminal I would run: sudo mdutil -i on / which would return "Indexing and searching disabled." In order to fix problem, I use to run the command : sudo rm /.metadata_never_index ; however, after the user would restart their machine, Spotlight, Finder, and Outlook would break again.

Recently, I have been running the following commands in order to fix the problem but I am unsure if it's a permission solution:

sudo mdutil -i off / sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight*
sudo rm -rf /.metadata_never_index
sudo mdutil -i on / sudo mdutil -E /

To give you more information, here are the steps I did with the last person I enrolled that had a search problem:
1. User was on Yosemite (10.10) ( the upgrade to 10.12 will be schedule for a later date)
2. enrolled user in JAMF ( search still worked)
3. Updated Office 2011- Office 2016 using a JAMF policy through Self Services ( Search still worked after the upgrade)
4. Turned on File Vault ( after the user logged in, the search function did not work)

I have no idea what is causing the problem, because I have done the same exact steps to other machines and the Search does not break. I do not have any Policies that disable Spotlight or have anything to do with spotlight. I thought it was the upgrade from Office 2011 to Office 2016 but it worked after I updated it with the one user. I also don't see why encrypt would affected it either.

If anyone has any suggestions. thoughts, or have run into this problem before, please let me know!

2 REPLIES 2

Asnyder
Contributor III

Try

launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

mcsoellner
New Contributor III

@Asnyder The problem I have discovered is the metadata_never_index file keeps coming back.

I do not know what this is happening.