Search Errors

I have encountered this issue quite a number of times in my farm. The issue becomes more difficult to troubleshoot if the tracing stops and there are no logs present. But I have been able to fix most issues related to search by following these steps.

Issues I have fixed using these steps are:

1.  Your search cannot be completed because of a service error. Try your search again or contact your administrator for more information.
2. Content index on Portal_Content could not be initialized. The content index is corrupt.
3. Query server not responding
4. Could not create a database session
5. Error editing content source schedule: "Access is denied"
6. The search service is currently offline. Visit the Services on Server page in SharePoint Central Administration to verify whether the service is enabled. This might also be because an indexer move is in progress.
7. The search request was unable to connect to the Search Service.

For your information, below is my farm configuration.

WEB01 – Web Application

APP01 – Central Admin + Search

APP02 – Index + Web Application

Step 1

Stop the Search Services on both Index and Query servers using Central Administration.

Alternatively, you can also use the stsadm command, stsadm -o osearch -action stop

Alternatively, you can also use the stsadm command, stsadm -o osearch -action start

Step 3

Reset the Indexer in SSP to the index server through Central Admin SSP Properties page.

Step 4

Set the security for C:\Windows\Tasks to read & write for the WSS_WPG account:

·        On the Index server make sure that you can see the Sharing and Security tab in the Windows tasks folder (usually C:\Windows\Tasks) by open a command prompt and type attrib –s %windir% \tasks.
·        Browser to C:\Windows\Tasks in explorer, right click and select properties. Grant the WSS_WPG group Read and Write permissions on the tasks folder.
·        Open a command prompt and type attrib +s %windir% \tasks to reset the tasks folder to its default view.

Step 5

Check to make sure that the search service account has correct rights to SQL.

Step 6

Go to Edit Properties for the SSP and make sure that the search account is mentioned in the process accounts section.

Step 7

Delete the content index in each SSP

Step 6

Start a full crawl in the SSP

Wait for the crawl to complete and then search should be working

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