>> Search service stuck at stopping or starting
Search as we know is one of the best features on MOSS, Office SharePoint has the best ability to index and search documents, file share’s, and other things as well, it stores the indexed documents in search databases and renders them whenever required.
Well that’s about how it works, but what will you do if your search service is central admin is shows the status as stopping or starting,If your search service is stuck even after you reboot the server this might be a problem,Look at the services console first and check if Windows SharePoint Search service is running and if the Office SharePoint servers search is running as wellThen check if they are running with the right service accounts.
This problem may arise the most when you have the two different accounts configured to run WSS and MOSSWhat should I do?Now you are at a stage where your search service is stuck it’s neither started not stopped. So when nothing works in SharePoint the command line works, let’s get our hero to work. First of all let’s get the search service stopped first.
We will stop the OSearch first and then the WSS search.
To stop the search server you will have to use the command line operation here is the command Stsadm –o osearch –action stop
Run iisreset / noforce
Similarly you will have to stop the wss search service
Stsadm –o spsearch –action stop
This will force stop the services, then we will un-provision the services before we actually start them, now if you are wondering what is provision service command used for it actually Starts or stops the SPService on the local computer or a custom service. To enumerate all the current running services with their service types in the farm, use the enumservices operationYou can know more from the link here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288605.aspx
Before running the provision service you will have to run stsadm –o enum services command to get the service type and name.
So copy every thing between and Then run the commandstsadm -o provisionservice -action stop -servicetype Osearchsimilarly for sp search.
Then run the following command psconfig -cmd services -install, and install the services.
Then run psconfig -cmd secureresources
Then start spsearch and osearch from command lineStsadm –o spsearch –action start & stsadm –o osearch - action start
I bet the services will be started now :)
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Friday, October 10, 2008
Step by step SharePoint migration
Steps to migrate one moss server to other server
1. Take back up of all databases from SQL management studio (in .bak format)
2. You can also copy the .mdf and .ldf files of the content databases
3. Must remember the versions of the databases.
4. Copy the backed up files to some safe location
5. Create a new MOSS server
5.1 Install .NET 3.0 or later version
5.2 Install SQL Server 2005 or later version with SQL management studio
5.3 Install MOSS
6. Do not run PSconfig after installation of MOSS
7. Before that we have to copy the backed up databases files to the new server
8. Restored the databases form the .bak files to the newly installed SQL server
9. You can attach .mdf files to the new databases.
10. After copying the backed up data to the newly created MOSS machine run PSConfig wizard
11. In PSConfig wizard if you want the same customization as it was in the previous one then connect the MOSS to the existing farm and in the existing farm select the old configuration database.
12. Wait till the PSConfig wizard will be completed.
13. Open the Central admin page and check whether you get the same customization or not.
Now how to up your previous sites back in to the new MOSS machine.
1. Create a new site in new MOSS machine
2. Go to the content databases option in Application management of the central admin page.
3. Dropped the existing database , now your site comes down
4. Open the command prompt and type the following command to attach the content DB of the previous machine
Stsadm –o addcontentdb –url -databasename
5. The database which you want to attach must be restored in the SQL server
1. Take back up of all databases from SQL management studio (in .bak format)
2. You can also copy the .mdf and .ldf files of the content databases
3. Must remember the versions of the databases.
4. Copy the backed up files to some safe location
5. Create a new MOSS server
5.1 Install .NET 3.0 or later version
5.2 Install SQL Server 2005 or later version with SQL management studio
5.3 Install MOSS
6. Do not run PSconfig after installation of MOSS
7. Before that we have to copy the backed up databases files to the new server
8. Restored the databases form the .bak files to the newly installed SQL server
9. You can attach .mdf files to the new databases.
10. After copying the backed up data to the newly created MOSS machine run PSConfig wizard
11. In PSConfig wizard if you want the same customization as it was in the previous one then connect the MOSS to the existing farm and in the existing farm select the old configuration database.
12. Wait till the PSConfig wizard will be completed.
13. Open the Central admin page and check whether you get the same customization or not.
Now how to up your previous sites back in to the new MOSS machine.
1. Create a new site in new MOSS machine
2. Go to the content databases option in Application management of the central admin page.
3. Dropped the existing database , now your site comes down
4. Open the command prompt and type the following command to attach the content DB of the previous machine
Stsadm –o addcontentdb –url
5. The database which you want to attach must be restored in the SQL server
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Infrastructure Update for MOSS
The update story................
MS released the infrastructure update for MOSS and WSS on 17th July 2008,
The update applies to the following products
Microsoft SharePoint server 2007
Microsoft Project server 2007
Microsoft Search Server 2008
Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express
Article to Download is http://support.microsoft.com/?id=951695 for WSS 3.0 and http://support.microsoft.com/?id=951547 for MOSS 2007, like The service packs that we install for WSS and MOSS we gonna follow the same procedure with the Infrastructure updates as well,
It is recommended that you install the WSS SP1 before you install the infrastructure update for WSS
And also install the WSS SP1 + MOSS SP1 before you install it for MOSS.
The update requires no reboot and does not makes any registry changes, remember to stop World Wide Web Publishing service (W3SVC) just to make sure the users are disconnected and the services are stopped before you start installing the update, the version of the SharePoint site changes to 12.0.6318.5000 after installation of the update, which can be verified from services on server link under Operation in CA or from the dbo.version of the Configuration databases.
What is Infrastructure Update?
Infrastructure update will be adding the functionalities to the SharePoint which was not originally shipped with the product.
These contain the Search server 2008 and the Search server Express, so if you have a full version of SQL the full version of Search server will be added and if you are existing with express edition (Basic install), you will have to settle with the express edition, I am assuming that the search server does not install its own SSEE but adds to the existing version of SSEE that you use for SharePoint (that means even if you use Search server on a Standalone install of MOSS it needs to be installed as a full version of Search server as it has to connect to the existing SQL databases nywas…..)
There are several Content Deployment updates shipped with the Infrastructure update as well, we will talk about the issues that it fixes for content deployment as well.
There is an Infrastructure update for Project server 2007 as well KB 951547 which is supposed to include several usability and performance updates for the Project server.
Alrighty, coming back to my favorite Search Server 2008 let’s see what’s in Infrastructure update for us,
How does the Infrastructure benefit my Search?
Ok, as we have been talking a lot about the Search server and how it is beneficial to our everyday search needs, here is what infrastructure update has to offer. Once you complete running the PS config wizard after installing the update and launch the Central Administration page you will notice that you see a new link Search Administration under Search Settings In the SSP (before… it showed only search settings and Search usage Reports). Now this is the page where you have all the options to control search, Crawls, schedule, describe content source and all the regular stuff, which can all be found together at a page so this feature is called a unified administration Dashboard
Besides all this it also does adds Federated Search to your Search administration page, Federated search is a method to obtain the results for a keyword from another Search engine and gives you results for it, it is all done with help of a web part which is configured to use the same query and fetch results from the web it can be Google, yahoo search and other search engines too.
When you create a new search page (after the update is installed) you can stop a federated web part configured by default, which pulls up the results from the Live.com, pretty cool must say….
In case you wanna learn how do you set federation on the Search page you can have a look into the video Federation of Search.
How will infrastructure help me in Content Deployment?
The infrastructure update address many top reported issues with the content deployment I am just copy – pasting them from the original site
Incremental bug fixes:
> Incremental import can fail if a feature with a custom content type has been reactivated on the destination.
> Unpublished pages do not get unpublished on the destination.
> Reinheriting permissions on the source does not propagate incrementally.
> Deleting a permission level on the source causes a "Permission level cannot be found." exception during incremental import.
> Incremental behavior with the Recycle Bin improved. Incremental import fails with a "FatalError: You cannot perform this action on a checked out document." exception.
"Violation of PRIMARY KEY constraint" error during export.
> Document "Title" field does not get deployed by incremental deployment in some cases.
In some cases, making permissions changes on the source or destination will result in a "The specified name is already in use." error.
> Deleting or renaming an item then creating one with the same name causes incremental deployment to fail.
> Incremental deployment fails when pages have independent permission settings.
> Deleting a file and folder can cause incremental deployment to fail in some cases.
Other bug fixes:
Removing a User from a group does not propagate to the destination during incremental deployment.
Some source web settings related to search are not propagated to the destination.
Content Deployment can time out incorrectly on large deployment jobs.
Miscellaneous SQL deadlocks.
Quick deployment jobs behave incorrectly when Variations is used.
Quick deployment fails when pages are Quick Deployed while the Quick Deploy job is running.
Running One-time jobs manually can fail.
In some cases, a content deployment job can get stuck in a "Preparing" state forever.
Deployment sometimes unghosts items that are ghosted on the source.
Custom master page settings on the source are not propagated to the destination during deployment.
Content deployment fails when compression is disabled.
Now there is one more point that I need to showcase here
“Known issues discovered after release of this update
Installing the Infrastructure Update in a SharePoint farm that uses Alternate Access Mapping with a reverse proxy or a network load balancer, such as in an extranet deployment, may cause some public URLs to become unresponsive. Microsoft is aware of this issue and is developing a solution. Before installing the Infrastructure Update, customers who use this configuration should use a test environment to verify that public URLs remain accessible after the update is installed. “ see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951695
This means that the alternate access mappings might break or the configured url might become unresponsive after installation so we need to make sure that we test the mappings before and after the install.
MS released the infrastructure update for MOSS and WSS on 17th July 2008,
The update applies to the following products
Microsoft SharePoint server 2007
Microsoft Project server 2007
Microsoft Search Server 2008
Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express
Article to Download is http://support.microsoft.com/?id=951695 for WSS 3.0 and http://support.microsoft.com/?id=951547 for MOSS 2007, like The service packs that we install for WSS and MOSS we gonna follow the same procedure with the Infrastructure updates as well,
It is recommended that you install the WSS SP1 before you install the infrastructure update for WSS
And also install the WSS SP1 + MOSS SP1 before you install it for MOSS.
The update requires no reboot and does not makes any registry changes, remember to stop World Wide Web Publishing service (W3SVC) just to make sure the users are disconnected and the services are stopped before you start installing the update, the version of the SharePoint site changes to 12.0.6318.5000 after installation of the update, which can be verified from services on server link under Operation in CA or from the dbo.version of the Configuration databases.
What is Infrastructure Update?
Infrastructure update will be adding the functionalities to the SharePoint which was not originally shipped with the product.
These contain the Search server 2008 and the Search server Express, so if you have a full version of SQL the full version of Search server will be added and if you are existing with express edition (Basic install), you will have to settle with the express edition, I am assuming that the search server does not install its own SSEE but adds to the existing version of SSEE that you use for SharePoint (that means even if you use Search server on a Standalone install of MOSS it needs to be installed as a full version of Search server as it has to connect to the existing SQL databases nywas…..)
There are several Content Deployment updates shipped with the Infrastructure update as well, we will talk about the issues that it fixes for content deployment as well.
There is an Infrastructure update for Project server 2007 as well KB 951547 which is supposed to include several usability and performance updates for the Project server.
Alrighty, coming back to my favorite Search Server 2008 let’s see what’s in Infrastructure update for us,
How does the Infrastructure benefit my Search?
Ok, as we have been talking a lot about the Search server and how it is beneficial to our everyday search needs, here is what infrastructure update has to offer. Once you complete running the PS config wizard after installing the update and launch the Central Administration page you will notice that you see a new link Search Administration under Search Settings In the SSP (before… it showed only search settings and Search usage Reports). Now this is the page where you have all the options to control search, Crawls, schedule, describe content source and all the regular stuff, which can all be found together at a page so this feature is called a unified administration Dashboard
Besides all this it also does adds Federated Search to your Search administration page, Federated search is a method to obtain the results for a keyword from another Search engine and gives you results for it, it is all done with help of a web part which is configured to use the same query and fetch results from the web it can be Google, yahoo search and other search engines too.
When you create a new search page (after the update is installed) you can stop a federated web part configured by default, which pulls up the results from the Live.com, pretty cool must say….
In case you wanna learn how do you set federation on the Search page you can have a look into the video Federation of Search.
How will infrastructure help me in Content Deployment?
The infrastructure update address many top reported issues with the content deployment I am just copy – pasting them from the original site
Incremental bug fixes:
> Incremental import can fail if a feature with a custom content type has been reactivated on the destination.
> Unpublished pages do not get unpublished on the destination.
> Reinheriting permissions on the source does not propagate incrementally.
> Deleting a permission level on the source causes a "Permission level cannot be found." exception during incremental import.
> Incremental behavior with the Recycle Bin improved. Incremental import fails with a "FatalError: You cannot perform this action on a checked out document." exception.
"Violation of PRIMARY KEY constraint" error during export.
> Document "Title" field does not get deployed by incremental deployment in some cases.
In some cases, making permissions changes on the source or destination will result in a "The specified name is already in use." error.
> Deleting or renaming an item then creating one with the same name causes incremental deployment to fail.
> Incremental deployment fails when pages have independent permission settings.
> Deleting a file and folder can cause incremental deployment to fail in some cases.
Other bug fixes:
Removing a User from a group does not propagate to the destination during incremental deployment.
Some source web settings related to search are not propagated to the destination.
Content Deployment can time out incorrectly on large deployment jobs.
Miscellaneous SQL deadlocks.
Quick deployment jobs behave incorrectly when Variations is used.
Quick deployment fails when pages are Quick Deployed while the Quick Deploy job is running.
Running One-time jobs manually can fail.
In some cases, a content deployment job can get stuck in a "Preparing" state forever.
Deployment sometimes unghosts items that are ghosted on the source.
Custom master page settings on the source are not propagated to the destination during deployment.
Content deployment fails when compression is disabled.
Now there is one more point that I need to showcase here
“Known issues discovered after release of this update
Installing the Infrastructure Update in a SharePoint farm that uses Alternate Access Mapping with a reverse proxy or a network load balancer, such as in an extranet deployment, may cause some public URLs to become unresponsive. Microsoft is aware of this issue and is developing a solution. Before installing the Infrastructure Update, customers who use this configuration should use a test environment to verify that public URLs remain accessible after the update is installed. “ see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951695
This means that the alternate access mappings might break or the configured url might become unresponsive after installation so we need to make sure that we test the mappings before and after the install.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Configuring Search Server 2008
Now lets focus on the configuration of search server so that it may help you pull out results for you. Now we have search server installed (I am continuing this from my post at http://alliknw.blogspot.com/2008/06/search-server-2008.html )
then if you have to locate where can you find the program to initiate it, its located at Start > All programs > Microsoft Search Server > Microsoft Search Server Administration.
When you click on that you will notice that it launches the Search server administration page, also if you notice the Central administration page of WSS in my case I see a Shared services link which is again The Search server Administration Page
then if you have to locate where can you find the program to initiate it, its located at Start > All programs > Microsoft Search Server > Microsoft Search Server Administration.
When you click on that you will notice that it launches the Search server administration page, also if you notice the Central administration page of WSS in my case I see a Shared services link which is again The Search server Administration Page
So you have a search configuration page which has a lot of things and we gonna have a look at them one by one. Now the first thing I noticed that the search server administration web site was made on he the application that hosts Central Admin and also when you login to the Central Administration page and Click on Shared services one you get the Search Administration page which has url like servername/ssp/_layouts/SearchAdministration.aspx. and now if on being Search Administration page you click on Home Tab It takes you to SSP home which has 4 options
1> Search Administration
2> Search Settings
3> Search usage reports
4> Usage analysis
>> Getting back to our administration page you have lot of links and web parts that are configured to different sections of the page
>>The left pane which is like a Quick launch bar contains links to administration pages of Search Administration and Central Administration
>>Second section is Crawling which also does have some 8 links to help us make crawling easier and simple they are:
1. Content Sources: They help you determine the sites that are included in the crawl, create crawl schedules and also perform crawl settings, also you can initiate a full or incremental crawl . You can add new Content sources which will have an include Sharepoint site, websites, File share folders, Exchange public folders
2. Crawl Rules : By default there is no Rule, but you can add a rule for a path suppose http://teamsite and then you can choose to exclude items in url or say include complex url (e.g. url with ?) and specify a content access account , use a client certificate, specify credentials o use cookies for crawling.
3. Crawl Log: Shows the number of crawls, url included in crawl and successes, warnings and errors with failure message for troubleshooting
4. Default content access account : which shows the account that you use to crawl the contains you can also change the account but you would have to perform a full crawl to get results
5. Manage File Types : is used to mange the file types which can be crawled it includes 38 types by default and you can add some more
6. Reset Crawled Content : This feature will reset the crawled content indexes and search will not work until you run a full crawl again which will again index all the files to search database
7. Crawler Impact Rule: This will help you control the file sharing or requesting between number of users you can mention a url and set property as number of users that can simultaneously request and get the same document those can be 1, 2, 4, 8
8. Farm-Level Search Settings : here you can specify and change administrators email address to contact to incase of a problem, You can specify a proxy server and configure its settings, Timeout settings will be amount of time the server will wait when connecting to other services and whether to use or ignore SSL certificate warnings.
Then there is another section Queries and Results which includes:
- Authoritive Pages: Here you can promote and demote your links and results suppose you want site A to show results first as compared to site B for a keyword you can set site A as most authoritive page and Site B as least authoritive page so what ever you search you will get more results froms Site A.
- Federated Locations : I will talk about this later when we cover federation
- Metadata Property : Crawled properties are automatically extracted from crawled content. Users can perform queries over managed properties. Use this option to create and modify managed properties and map crawled properties to managed properties. Changes to properties will take effect after the next full crawl.
- Server Name Mapping : Specify the address at which the content will be crawled and the address that will be displayed in search results.
- Search result Removal: will remove the specified urls from occuring in the results of the search
Usage Reports :
- Queries Report : This part shows the reports for the queries that are searched by useres it also shows a pie diagram for the sites contibution in gentrating the request
- Results Report : Results report shows reports for quesries with zero results and best bets configured, with zero best bets
Webparts:
Active Crawls: This web part shows the number of calls running actively, duration it has been running and nature of crawl full or incremental.
Recently completed crawls: this web part shows the completed crawls, type, duration, successes and errors.
System status : It shows the system status which includes crawl status either running or Idle, Items in index, Server status which is normally the indexing server, propagation status, Default content access account, Contact e-mail, Proxy server none, Scopes update status, Scopes update schedule, Scopes needing update, Search alerts status, Query logging
Shortcuts: Which is actually links web parts used for navigation
I want to : This web part helps you provide links that can be like a FAQ to help people configure search clicking on the link take you to help search
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Search Server 2008
Lets start with the concept of search, Search is one of the most growing business today on enterprise industry it helps us to get hold of our documents and important folders and files instantly, you don't have to waste your time locating it,
We can use the search items from Windows Desktop Search to Google desktop Search, which will index documents on your PC and when you put in the key words, and ha here is your file.
Then we have Google One box which can be used for many reasons to derive results out of your intranet site. So to compare to it we have Microsoft search server 2008 now what this search server helps you derive results from your intranet site as well as internet applications.
Now to know a detailed explanation about What search server is and all other information please refer to http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/
It is available as a free download with SQL express edition and a Full version which has to be installed and configured with Full SQL.
Now as I begin to install Search server 2008, I noticed that,
• It does not support AD creation mode, so if you have a AD creation mode the setup wont proceed and you would have to drop the config database and re-create one with AD again.
We can use the search items from Windows Desktop Search to Google desktop Search, which will index documents on your PC and when you put in the key words, and ha here is your file.
Then we have Google One box which can be used for many reasons to derive results out of your intranet site. So to compare to it we have Microsoft search server 2008 now what this search server helps you derive results from your intranet site as well as internet applications.
Now to know a detailed explanation about What search server is and all other information please refer to http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/
It is available as a free download with SQL express edition and a Full version which has to be installed and configured with Full SQL.
Now as I begin to install Search server 2008, I noticed that,
• It does not support AD creation mode, so if you have a AD creation mode the setup wont proceed and you would have to drop the config database and re-create one with AD again.
• I am installing full search server on my WSS 3.0 Machine now when you notice the splash screen that pops up when you inseart the CD, it has many options
1> Search Server Preparation Tool : now this is a super cool feature as it helps you to determine and check if the prerequisites are available and installed on your system or not, if they are not the search server begins installing them automatically, these include windows server 2003 SP1, Windows Workflow foundations included in .net 3.0 and .net frame work 2.0, IIS and ASP.net and web server extensions, hence its called a Search server preparation tool, once you run this wizard it shows the time it started and time elapsed, it completed successfully for me within 2 minutes, also if you open the installer CD you will notice two .exe files out of that one is PreRequisiteInstaller.exe, which is initiated when you run the Preparation tool
2> Install Search Server 2008: This one will start installing Search server 2008, also it will ask you 3 options (as in sharepoint) Complete, Web Front End or Standalone, I took Complete, it gets installed in two parts, one is installation of search server and other is Applying updates. after the installation it will ask you to run technologies and configuration wizard as we have a Express edition of search server installed the databases for search will be made on the SSEE .
So when you run the wizard it will again take you to 9 steps of configuration
Step 1 : Initiating Sharepoint product and Technologies wizard
Step 2 : Initiating upgrade sequence
Step 3 : Installing Help collections
Step 4 : Securing sharepoint resources
Step 5 : Registering sharepoint services
Step 6 : Registering features
Step 7 : Registering application content files
Step 8 : Upgrading Products and Technologies wizard
Step 9 : Finalizing The upgrade
Out of these I noticed that Step 2 and Step 8 took a lot of time but in the end it was successful. After you finish this wizard .
It will launch the Central admin page with search server configuration page. There you need to fill the required section which will ask you for the indexer and default content access account, Search center account. After you fill in these and hit on start it will perform the following operations.
Starting search service
Starting help service
Creating Shared services provider
Creating web application for search center
Creating search center site
Then it gives you a page saying its complete click on OK and your ready to go
This is how you install the search server 2008, I will show you how to configure it on my future posts.
Do remember to leave me comments
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