The SharePoint site I am responsible is pretty small and not used by allot of people. However, that is soon to change, as I am adding allot of content to the Wiki library for technical support and trouble shooting, and I wanted to make use of the search functionality to allow people to search for content.

So I went to the search bar, and received an error message indicating that “Your search cannot be completed because this site is not assigned to an indexer. Contact your administrator for more information.” I always find it troubling when an error message says to contact me. I started doing some searching online and made my way to the Central Administration Portal Page for our SharePoint Server. I found that you need to assign your content database to a search server, so I went to Application Management\Content Databases, selected by one and only content database, and saw that they drop down box used to select a search server was greyed out, how unfortunate.

Some more on the job training led me to Operations\Services on Server, where I saw that I was missing the “Windows SharePoint Services Search” service. Looking at the services applet under administration tools, I saw that I did have a “Windows SharePoint Services Search” service installed, and after configuring it to log on as Local System, I was able to get it started. However, I couldn’t get it to show up as a service in central administration. 

I read a couple of posts online about re-running the Sharpoint configuration wizard, so I thought I would try that. Under Start\Programs\Administrative Tools, there should be a short cut for SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard. After starting this application, I was prompted to change various aspects of my SharePoint installation. I choose to keep everything the same. I was a little disappointed in that I didn’t see any options for adding SharePoint search, but after the wizard completed, and I went back to Operations\Services on Server, I had “Windows SharePoint Services Search” now listed, but stopped. I’m wondering if restarting the IIS Application Pool for my SharePoint server, or the Windows SharePoint Services Administration service after starting the Windows Sharepoint Services Search service would have yielded the same results?

Back in Central Administration, I clicked on the Start link in an attempt to start the Search service, but was redirected to a configuration page. On this page I was prompted to select a Service Account, Content Access Account, Search Database, and Indexing Schedule.

• Service Account: It specifically says you can not use a built in account, such as Local Service or Network Service. I choose to use a domain service account that I used for some related services on this server. This account should be the same account as the Content Access account (read my section below about the content sources cannot be accessed error)
• Content Access Account: This account should be separate from the service account and only have read-only access to the content database. I decided to create a new local account to achieve this. I made this account a member of the Guests local group, and added it to the data_reader role in the content database.
• Search Database: Accepted Defaults
• Indexing: Accepted default value of every 5 minutes to start, and then I went back and changed it Daily between 3-4 am.

After clicking start, the page took awhile to redirect, but I didn’t get any errors or warnings. I checked the Search service, and as I assumed, the log on account was changed to the domain account I specified. I also had a new database named WSS_Seach_ServerName, so it looks like things were at least setup correctly.

Jumping back to Application Management\Content Databases and selecting my lone content database, I was now able to select a search server. Running a search on my SharePoint site seemed to work, although no matches were found, which could be because the indexed had not run yet.

Five minutes later, and still no search results for obvious terms. In the Timer Status page on Central Administration, I could see that the Search Process was running every five minutes, so I went to the application log figuring errors would show up there. Sure enough, I was getting “The update cannot be started because the content sources cannot be accessed.” every five minutes. Checking my database permissions, I see that my service account has dbo permissions to the content and search databases. My content serach account, has data reader permissions to the content database (which I added previously), and dbo permissions to the search database (added automatically during setup it seems).

Back to Google. I found a discussion thread where someone stated that the Service Account and Content Access Account need to be the same, and re-affirmed the requirement that the account used only have read only permissions. So I went ahead and stopped the search service via Central Administration, deleted the search database, and then reconfigured and started the search service. The search database was re-created, and I noticed that my processor pegged at 100% for awhile and my search database grew in size from 4mb to 31 MB indicating that something actually got put in it.

Since I had stopped and reconfigured the search service, I had to reselect the search server for my specific content database under Application Management like I did before. After waiting five minutes for the indexing to run, I was getting search results.