I was quite disappointed when I read Friday evening that Spotlight would only index volumes physically attached to my machine (e.g., FireWire or internal). I have a Linux server in the basement with lots of data that I was hoping to index and mine with Spotlight. This evening, while digging around, I found a command line utility called mdutil. It has a switch, -i, to enable indexing on a volume. So I just went ahead as root (sudo bash) and ran:
mdutil /Volumes/ldm -i on
Then I checked the status with
mdutil /Volumes/ldm -s
And, behold ... I got back the following:
/Volumes/ldm/:
Status: Indexing Enabled
A second later, the Spotlight Icon started pulsating. Half an hour later, it stopped. I went to a Finder window, typed a query, and selected the network volume ldm. To my delight, matches were coming back instantaneously on files deep down in the file hierarchy on that volume. I have not checked whether newly added files are indexed on the fly, too, and I do not know where the .Spotlight-V100 file is stored (not in the root of the volume in question it seems).
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050430233117572