Mac OS X – Force Spotlight Search to Index a Network Folder

I’ve had some ongoing issues with some Mac users at work recently who were complaining about the length of time that it was taking for Finder to open up some of our network shares. At first, I thought that the issue may have stemmed from our backups that happened to be running at the same time, but after I figured out how to make those processes run in the background and only when the system was idle and that the problem was still prevalent, I had to investigate further.

Upon further inspection, I found that the folders in the network drives they were accessing and sometimes taking up to a minute or more to populate, in most cases had several thousand files and subfolders. After the initial loading of the folder, everything was still easily accessible and readily available after that if you left that directory and came back into it, so chalk it up to a folder caching/indexing issue. Continue reading “Mac OS X – Force Spotlight Search to Index a Network Folder”

CryptoWall 3.0 Ransomware – Ouch, It Hurts So Good…Get Out the Backup Tapes. You’ve Got Those Right?

Being the badass network admin that you are, you try to keep your servers up to date with all the latest Windows updates, you run antivirus on all your machines on your network and scan daily, you have made sure that none of your users have local admin rights to their machines so they can’t install any software, and so you think you are fairly well covered when it comes to viruses and spyware, well think again.

My company just got hit pretty hard with this new CryptoWall 3.0 virus. If you are unfamiliar with it, basically it encrypts any user accessible data on local and network shares that it has permissions to and holds it ransom for BitCoin payments. Continue reading “CryptoWall 3.0 Ransomware – Ouch, It Hurts So Good…Get Out the Backup Tapes. You’ve Got Those Right?”