sharepoint

Stuff about windows sharepoint services 3.0

How to start crawling of search on sharepoint site

Mar 23rd

Posted by nikhil in search

No comments

Given command uses stsadmin tool provided by dear Microsoft. This command will start crawling of content forcefully. This is a heavy operation for SQL server.

This command will be required if
1. Your default crawling time is like every 12 hrs and you want to start crawling right now.
2. Some site are not performing search even if search is working for other site.

Steps:
Open a command window and paste following command

cd C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN
stsadm.exe -o spsearch -action fullcrawlstart

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Make search working for host header based sharepoint site

Nov 19th

Posted by nikhil in search

9 comments

This article assumes that search service is working. If you want help in starting search service feel free to contact me.

Search is very messed up problem with WSS [Windows Sharepoint Service 3.0]. Search is not working on your setup is because WSS is not able to find sharepoint site/Web applications.

Let have a quick overview of how search works

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 uses the same SharePoint search technology used by Enterprise Search in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 rather than relying on Microsoft SQL Server full-text searching, as previous versions of Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services did.

Search in Windows SharePoint Services addresses a single site collection, and is automatically scoped to current context and limited to site and subsites, list or library, or folder. If you are looking at a subsite, you cannot search over the entire site collection, but you can search over all subsites of the current site.

Only SharePoint content in the site collection can be crawled. You cannot configure Search to crawl databases, mail servers, application servers, or Web sites and file shares outside of the site collection. In a deployment with more than one site collection, each site collection provides Search only for content on that site collection, and there is no aggregation of search results across site collections.

Content Crawling

 Most of the capabilities for Search are configured automatically during installation.

One content source is automatically created for all user content Web applications. No administration details are exposed to site administrators. When a new site is created, the site’s URL is added to the start addresses for the content source.

One content source is automatically created for the Central Administration Web application. Full crawls occur as specified in the Administrator-controlled crawl schedule on the Central Administration configuration page.

Steps to make search work

Your site must be locally browseable on Search server. To avoid error “HTTP 401.1 – Unauthorized: Logon Failed” that comes while browsing site follow the steps given in MS KB article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861 

Create Web Application and set search server.

  1. Create web application for host header site collection
  2. Add search server instance to content database. Go to Sharepoint central administration -> Application management -> content database -> Select web application -> click on content database then select search server
  3. Add URL of web application and IP address in IIS site
  4. Add URL and IP in C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts on search server. [ This step is very important as this enable local browsing of web application]
Create sharepoint site
  1. Create host header base site in search enabled web application.
  2.  Just add URL and IP in C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts on search server. 
Now check If search is working on now.

Troubleshooting steps:

Check content is crawled or not

  1. Go to the SQL server where search database is created.
  2. Browse table and find and open the table “MSSCrawlHostList”
  3. This table contain columns 
    1. “HostName” which represent url of web application
    2. “SuccessCount” which represent Sucees ful crawls 
    3. “ErrorCount” this means YOU ARE IN trouble 
  4. Your site must have at least one “SuccessCount”

Check for Exact error for which search is failing

  1. Go to “administrative tool” -> “event viewer”
  2. Find out error under “Application”
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