Just [user] doesn’t cut it!
I was installing a MOSS system yesterday, and starting the WSS search service was causing me problems. I kept getting errors of the form
SearchServiceInstance.Provision (server ‘VM-AWB-MOSS01’) failed. Setting back to previous status ‘Disabled’.
Well, a google trawl turned up a fairly obvious solution – which just didn’t occur to me. Make sure the account name includes the domain!
Thanks Bergen!
I don’t know why this wasn’t working, but search on my SharePoint VM wasn’t indexing the collaboration portal that was our top level site collection – indeed, it wasn’t even crawling it. So I changed the start path to the fully qualified path (e.g. http://vm-moss07/ to http://vm-moss07.dev.deltascheme.com/), and now at least a few pages were crawled – those being, unfortunately, the pages that redirected to the ‘not fully qualified’ path. So I put both into the content source – and it crawled the whole site collection correctly.
I’m really not sure why, to be honest. I haven’t checked the alternative access mappings, but I don’t see why the search didn’t work without the fully qualified server name. The crawling of the My Sites and Central Admin site collections worked fine without being fully qualified.
I’m sure it’s something simple – any guesses anyone?
I was having a number of issues with Search – and getting lots of errors in the event logs. I followed these instructions on updating registry settings to make PDF indexing work – and it seemed to help. Certainly, I seemed to get fewer error messages in the Windows Event Logs.
Okay, so I just made an interesting discovery. In the master pages on SharePoint there is a content placeholder called PlaceHolderTitleBreadcrumb. A slightly odd name – I’m not sure it should have ‘title’ in it, as that seems to make assumptions about how you’re going to use it – but in fairness, it is a placeholder for breadcrumbs. Great!
Except if you go the search page. Then, the search box is shown in the breadcrumb placeholder. WTF! Who the hell designed that? I mean, what idiot decided to put a large control, with LOTS of padding (discussed wonderfully by Heather Solomon).
Speaking of padding – that padding is hard coded into the control. It is fucking CSS, but they put it into the control. Nobody would ever want to get rid of that 50px padding above this control, right? Nobody would have designed space for the nice little breadcrumbs only to be caught out when the stonking search control sticks it’s flabby ass there, right?
Wrong. I’ve been caught, and I’m not the only one. As Tom says, the solution isn’t complicated – but I shouldn’t have to solve it. He’s right when he discusses the ‘contract’ of the master page. This design bug is just wrong.
And I don’t believe that I should have to write my own delegate controls all the time ‘cos someone was too lazy to write theirs in a generic way. I mean, this is supposed to be the office platform. Don’t hardcode styles into your delegate controls, don’t assume your control will be in a table row, and, in fact, could we stop using tables so we might make an accessible system? It’s kind of important in many countries…
Interesting – Deploying and Supporting Enterprise Search – interesting. Gives you an idea of the hardware necessary for a big system, and the sort of on-going administration required.
Described on Mark Harrison’s Blog (notice the typo mentioned)
Edit: And more about integrating with a website’s own search
So, one of my colleagues set up Sharepoint to index some external blogs. Just as a bit of an experiment, and maybe a way of capturing people’s (possibly, though not normally) temporary blog postings.
Well, the server dutifully set off to index the Internet. Yeah, not a few blogs but the whole enchillada. Unsurprisingly, when I went to the machine, it was reporting ‘Low Disk Space’. A brief search showed up some ma-hooo-sive (i.e. large) index files.
“Right”, I thought as I looked at a report saying ‘0 bytes free’, “I’ll clear the indexes”
Wrong. I went to the search administration pages, and tried to reset the indexes. I got no response – no error, nothing. My browser just showed the ‘page loading’ bar. No page ever loaded.
So I set the blogs path to be excluded, and tried to run a full index – again, no result.
In the end, the only answer I found was (get this), deleting the index file by hand. Then you can do exciting things like, I dunno, reset the indexes or run a full reindex. It appears that having the disc full prevented Sharepoint from being able to do anything with the indexes. Which was fun, as they were filling the disc.
Andy Burns' Blog 