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.
Posted
Tuesday, February 24, 2009 1:45 PM
by
CoreyRoth
There seems to be a huge plague of the following error sweeping through the SharePoint community right now. This occurs when you go to the Search Settings page on your SSP. You will probably notice it before this by a user trying to search and getting an error. Here is the text.
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.
It’s also been sweeping through the forums. Here are two posts about it just in the last couple of days.
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointsearch/thread/da8d8bdc-5788-4992-8245-b98d5341acf8
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointsearch/thread/17a12447-7c77-492c-a7b9-2269b81cfafa/?ffpr=0
First, let’s start by saying that when this happens to most people that a) the search service is most certainly online and b) an indexer move is not in progress. Google as much as you want, I have yet to see a concrete solution that didn’t result in some poor soul having to rebuild a search index. I have had two clients experience this issue since the beginning of the year, plus I have had other SharePoint consultants tell me of similar horror stories. I think the ultimate cause of the issue may be security related, as there have been some mixed results saying giving your crawl account administrator privileges fixes it (however, you never want to run like this).
So how do you fix it? Well as I implied, I do not know of a way to fix it which allows you to keep your search index. This part is mainly hearsay, but one of my clients was instructed by Microsoft support to rebuild their SSP. This did in fact fix it, but it also meant I had to reconfigure everything in the BDC as well as the Search content sources, scopes, managed properties, etc.
Another slighlty less painful method is to stop the Office Search Service in Central Administration. When I say this, I mean clicking stop in Central Administration which deconfigures the service, not by stopping the service in the Services control panel. Then, you reconfigure the Office Search Service with a new database. Again you have to reconfigure all of your search settings, but you don’t lose any BDC, Excel Services, and other items.
UPDATE: I was talking about this issue with a client and he was told by Microsoft support that this can occur when you have a farm and some of the servers aren't all on the same patch level in the farm. In this case Infrastructure Update was applied on some servers, but not all of them. I haven't confirmed this myself, but this does make a lot of sense and I have seen other posts out there that seem to imply this. I would certainly check this first before rebuilding your search service.
I am just trying to bring visibility to this issue, because honestly I am tired of reconfiguring SSPs. This issue is way out of hand right now and I really think it needs to be addressed by Microsoft.