We’re moving on up! Over the past month we’ve been working on upgrading our SharePoint farms to SharePoint Foundation 2010. So far, so good, except for one rather annoying roadblock that’s taken me ’til now to figure out.
We’re using Search Server 2010 Express to power our searches on Foundation (why not just SharePoint Foundation search, you ask? Because it doesn’t support iFilters, such as Adobe’s PDF iFilter). Like Office SharePoint Server 2007, Search Server 2010 features an administration page for managing the system.
The problem we were experiencing was that once we imported in the databases from our existing SharePoint farm, the search administration page was inaccessible to anyone except the System Account. It didn’t matter that the user logged in was a farm administrator.
While there are TechNet discussions regarding this issue, there are no real solutions. Bummer.
After multiple rebuilds of the 2010 farm, we narrowed down the problem to one content database. Testing the database for issues (PowerShell cmdlet Test-SPContentDatabase) yielded no problems. Nor did wading through the “verbose” logs (which by the way, is no fun, as it is indeed verbose). Some further investigation narrowed it down further to one particular site collection. Remove the offending database or site collection and access to the administration page would be restored.
We began by checking the site for permissions issues, some of which did pop up but did not fix the issue. Next we checked for long URLs (remember, SharePoint does not like URLs > 256 characters). None found. After some more experimentation, eureka!
As it turns out, this was a site that was imported from a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) farm. MOSS included some features not found in the base SharePoint product, including search. Venture onto the Features page of the site collection and you’ll find a button to activate Search features on the site.
Now we go back to the Search Administration page. Viola, we have access again!