SharePoint Search Engineering - Fixing a Broken Query Server

We were seeing errors when a new MOSS query server in a medium sized SharePoint 2007 farm would not connect into the indexing topology and being to receive index replications and updates.  As a result, unless there was another query service available, users would get the message “The search request was unable to connect to the Search Service.”    As a recovery step, the query role was transferred back to the primary index/crawl server while a permanent resolution was implemented. Dropping the problematic server from the farm and re-adding had no immediate effect.  

The specific error which is seen in SharePoint Search Administration is:

Could not connect to server VPSPQ101 for application PrimarySSP.  This error might occur if the server is not responding to client requests, the firewall or proxy configuration is preventing the server from being contacted or the search administration Web service is not running on the server.

And at other points during recovery, query servers would remain in intiializaiton mode indefinitely with any results.

The ultimate fix for this was found by replacing the self-signed SSL web certificates on all farm servers.  It is believed that these certificates, used to encrypt some intrafarm communications, became corrupted during .NET Framework system software updates.  

The fix can be performed using a command line tool (“SelfSSL.exe”) included as part of the IIS 6.0 Resource Kit Tools [http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=56FC92EE-A71A-4C73-B628-ADE629C89499&displaylang=en ]  The exact syntax of the selfSSL fix is:

selfssl /s:951338967 /v:1000

Further details on this technique can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/962928 .  (The additional .NET Framework 3.5 updates outlined in that article were not required to restore our SharePoint query servers.)  Hope this is helpful!

Comments

[TMZ]

This blog has some great and very insightful content!

[RIck]

Perfect, fixed it right off. Thanks!

FYI:
2 server farm, 1 Query, 1 Index
I had .Net 3.5 (with 959209) up to date before my MOSS install.

[KMA]

Great - happy to help!