Happy 2009! The new year kicked off with an interesting challenge. I went to the SharePoint environment I've been supporting to do a search, and oddly, there was no Search box on the home page. No biggie, went to Search Center, and when I put in my search terms I got the beloved "Unknown Error" back. Yikes!
Same thing if I tried opening up any of the Search config pages in SSP Config. The logs had all sorts of stuff - missing "S2LeftNav_Administration", missing features, and the SSP Search DB had some broken stored procedures, Proc_MSS_Recompile was missing, proc_MSS_FlushTemp0 was missing some arguements, the Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls.SearchBoxEx control was missing, all kinds of stuff.
Found a post where someone had applied the July Infrastructure Update and had seen some of these errors, and had a fix of updating certain specific files. But, I didn't apply that fix as one of my colleagues said there was an issue with the Alternate Access Mapping (subsequently fixed in the October update).
Well, looking back into the Event Viewer, I saw that 'someone did something' - Dec 19th a security patch for SharePoint was applied to close up a hole with Search. With the odd state of things, I guessed that whomever applied the update probably freaked out when the SharePoint Configuration Wizard started & bailed out - bad idea!! Sure enough, re-running the Wizard (with screen caps which are going into an admin guide thank you very much indeed) cleared up the problems.
Next weirdness was a 10 hour incremental crawl, and the indexer showing "Computing ranking" for a long spell. Well, stopped the crawl, reset the index, then did a full crawl, then about 10 minutes later (not a heap of content) started getting search results again.
But of course, Search not working for three weeks ought to have raised at least one trouble ticket!! Looks like it's time for some end user education...
