Spotlight randomly stops indexing my drive

As a mac devotee, I've become a regular (indeed dependent) user of the spotlight feature.
A developer tells me... 'you never said....'
'aha!' I say typing the ichat alias into spotlight and returning the evidence in a new york minute... I asked you to do this on such a day at such a time... so there! Is there such a thing as a 'smug' smiley!?

Anyhow spotlight's memory of events appears limited to the 12 July 2010 and we're well into August at the time of writing. try disabling items in spotlight preferences they say and then re-enable...... well this did nothing for me.

However there was a simple terminal command fix.


check status of indexing

sudo mdutil -E /

turn on indexing

sudo mdutil -i on /