Search Service is Offline… when clicked on Search Settings page of Shared Services Provider

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BEHAVIOR:

On MOSS 2007 SharePoint Farm, You might sometime land on the following messages:

1. When clicked on the Search Settings page of the Shared Services Administration:         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

2.When you try to Reset All Crawled content, you get the following message : Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040D1B  or

3. Event ID : 6482 ; “Reason: Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040D1B”  or

4. Event ID : 6398; “Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040D1B”

ENVIRONMENT:

MOSS 2007 (single or multi server farm)

RESOLUTION: You will need to follow the step given below:

Stsadm –o osearch –action stop  on the Index server

Stsadm –o osearch –action stop on the Query server

The above command will remove all the indexes that were already built by previous crawl. I have seen that even after performing the above command and resetting the crawled contents from the SSP, the indexes are still on the disk.

So the best way to go ahead is to set a new Index location on the Index server and the Query server.

On the Index server box, run the following stsadm command to enable Index role :

stsadm –o osearch -action start -role Index -farmcontactemail <e-mail address> -farmserviceaccount] <account name> -farmservicepassword <password>   –defaultindexlocation <Index location path>

On the Query box, run the following stsadm command to enable Query role :

stsadm -o osearch -action start -role Query -defaultindexlocation <Index location path>

Then run the following stsadm command on the Query server to enable the share:

stsadm -o osearch –propagationlocation <Index location path>

Details : https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262920.aspx

Once you have successfully completed the command, you will be able to access the Search Administration page and may see the following :

Server status shows status as “Error” and Crawl Status also shows status as “Error”

Follow the steps provided in the KB article https://support.microsoft.com/kb/962928 and run the below command:

selfssl /s:951338967 /v:1000

The Server status no longer shows “Error” message and shows the actual Query server location size.

When you click on the Search Setting page, you may still not able to open the page and get  the 403 forbidden error message.

Follow the KB article https://support.microsoft.com/kb/926959 

Now you should be able to access the Search Administration page as well as the Search Settings page of the Shared Services Provider without any error message.

Hope this was helpful.