Last week I ran into an interesting issue while preparing for my presentation at COSPUG Show & Tell. The application I demo uses Search results for displaying documents. Typically, I turn off full and incremental crawls in my VM to save a few cycles. Since my demo relies I search, I set the search schedules and waited; unfortunately after the incremental crawl ran a few times, none of my search results were returning anything. I then manually kicked off a full crawl – again no results. Dang, maybe my search index is hosed? Reset the index and full crawl – no results.
I checked out the Event Viewer and had tons of these messages (every time a full or incremental crawl ran):
Event Type: Warning
Event Source: Windows SharePoint Services 3 Search
Event Category: Gatherer
Event ID: 2436
Date: 05/20/2009
Time: 12:30:41 pm
User: N/A
Computer: SERVERNAME
Description:
The start address <http://servername:20000/sites/sitename> cannot be crawled.Context: Application ‘SharedServices1′, Catalog ‘Portal_Content’
Details: The object was not found. (0×80041201)
OK, not a helpful error message. Searched Google and lots of resolutions related to AAM and other things which didn’t seem to fit my scenario. I then checked out the Search Logs in the SSP and found the following errors:
The object was not found. (The item was deleted because it was either not found or the crawler was denied access to it.)
The object in my case was http://servername:20000/. Which is interesting because I don’t have a site at the root. Hmm. Let’s add a blank team site at the root and try again. Yeah! Success! Search works!
Summary:
- SP2 (or a update between SP1 and SP2) made having a site at the root to search a requirement. I have talked to a few SharePoint administrators and they all said I should have had a site at the root anyway (Sean McDonough had a blog post from 2007 on the subject); however, search was working fine prior to installing SP2 without the root site.
- Lesson learned. If you have a separate VM for demoing, leave well enough alone and avoid rocking the boat by upgrading (or at least ensure you have enough time to dry-run your demo) unless you absolutely need to. Would have looked like a real sap if I didn’t find the search issue prior to delivering my presentation.
- SharePoint has many locations to find errors. Just a matter of looking in the right location.
