Changes to SharePoint 2003 Installs

I recently worked on another SharePoint project where we did unusual things with SharePoint. But, this time we actually used some of the core SPS functionality like search to index about 5,000 documents for a call center.

We built out Production last week and were doing some testing and discovered that search was broken. We could see in the Search Settings page that we were getting an error: “An error occurred attempting to connect to the index server”. What made this even stranger was that I had just done a full SPS Restore, including the index, which meant the topology was correct and communicating well.

Turns out that after Windows Service Pack 1, security changed and there are new requirements for the service account used for Application Pools. Here are the two changes:

1) The SPS service administrator account was not added in the admin group on the servers in farm. Originally, the SPS documentation stated this user needed to be a local “Power User”. This is documented in Q555309.

2) The SPS website application pool account was not added to the DCOM users group on all the servers in farm. Apparently this is not documented in a Q article (not sure why), but this is required for search.

Lastly, our search is still broken because I specified the name of the web site: https://myapp.mycorp.com. We hadn’t generated the SSL cert yet, so when the crawler tried to index the site, it doesn’t exist.

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