Monday, April 5, 2010

SSP Search error (Search application for SSP… is not provisioned)

On one of our farm we noticed that search had not been working, and the search administration page would give this message: “Crawl status The search application for 'SharedServices' on server [SERVERNAME] is not provisioned. Confirm that the Windows SharePoint Services Timer service and Windows SharePoint Services Administration service are running on the server. “

Even though search had been previously configured there, and required services were running, there was not obvious things that would usually jump out .

To troubleshoot it, I first tried stopping Office search from the UI. The status of “stopping” had been not switched to “Stopped” and kinda hang there for a while.

Trying to stop through stsadm –o osearch –action stop, yielded no result as well.

Running: “Net stop osearch” just gave me the “the service could not be controlled in its present state”, same message was observer when I hit stop the services console.

Kill utility was not available on that server and restarting the server was not an option as it was a production server.

Here is the list of steps that resolved the issue:

  • End the process it’s self through tasks manager
  • In central admin the “stopping” message for this Office search disappeared and instead I saw “stopped”
  • Stopping WSS search was not an issue after these steps
  • Then go and delete index from the index location.
  • Start wss search services
  • Start Office search services
  • Edit properties of existing SSP –
    •  this is when I realized that db the SSP was referencing does not exist. And That was the problem all along
  • I created new ssp, associated mysites with this new ssp.
  • Changed association of other web apps with the new SSP, made the new ssp default
  • Started full crawl, a bingo.

Hope it helps :-)

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