Seeking software for searching network drives on Mac OS X

This assumes general familiarity with Unix. Try this command in the terminal: sudo mdutil -i on /Volume/yorusharedvolume/ That forces Spotlight to index whatever volume (or path, really) you tell it to. No guarantees on indexing speed of the network. You might want to connect your time capsule via ethernet until the index is done.

I used Time Machine (is that what you mean?) with my iMac, but discovered the same problem. I just started using http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html and it works great for me.

SuperDuper looks like a backup program--am I missing something on their site? I want to quickly search a network share. In case my post was ambiguous, I enabled the filesharing feature of Time Capsule so that it works like a NAS.

As long as your Time Capsule volume is showing up in the Finder, you can use http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/freeware/index.html [http://www.devon-technologies.com/files/EasyFind.dmg.zip]. You can set it to search filenames or contents.

I totally agree with al_fresco; EasyFind is the bomb. You might also want to give http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html or http://blacktree.com/?quicksilver a try if you need searching and application launching (among other things). Note: QuickSilver has gone open source and the latest builds can be found http://code.google.com/p/blacktree-alchemy/downloads/list.

Don't let Nathan's disclaimer scare you. That's not too hard. Just find the name and path of the drive in the unix system, which is probably /Volumes/(Drive name here, No parenthesis). Put it in quotes if there is a space. Copy his command exactly into the terminal. That can be found in Applications/Utilities. It's a sudo command, which tells the computer you want to do something as root, an account which has more permissions than your regular account. OSX will ask for your password to make sure you meant to type that command in and have the right to do that. After that, just wait for it to finish and that's it.

PS: Nthing Quicksilver. It's a great launcher which can be even more versatile as you learn more about it (Lifehacker.com has some great articles on it). Spotlight gets better with every release, but Quicksilver seems to be faster and better at predicting what you want. It's a learning launcher, and it predicts the application you want as you type. It's a bit like the address bar in Firefox 3.

I believe you can make locate (already present on your system) index such a drive. Try man locate and man locate.updatedb from a shell prompt.

Oops, to amend my previous post - the path should be:sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/yoursharedvolume/I was tired!