Next on the agenda was to open the Search Center page so that users could, well, use it. From the admin page, click “Site Actions,” “Site Settings,” “People and Groups,” “New,” and “Add Users.” (This last option is misnamed, because you can add users and groups here.) At this point, you can browse the directory, create a list of users and groups manually, or click a checkbox to add all authenticated users.
Adding the users and groups isn’t all you need to do, though. You also have to give them permissions (generally “read” is adequate). Another option is to add your users and groups to an existing Sharepoint group. (Remember, this search engine is “borrowed” from Sharepoint.)
Easy enough. Now it’s time to visit the Search Center page and perform a search. One of the files in my test share contained a “read me” file that included the word “silent,” so I thought I’d search for that. Oops – after 47 minutes, MSSX had still not completed the crawl of my test share. “No results matching your search were found.” So I dove into troubleshooting mode. Are all the needed services running? Check. Does the admin page show that the crawl is in progress? Check. Event log? Hmm, tons of 10016 errors… but Microsoft states that I can “safely ignore” these (Knowledge Base article 920783). Next troubleshooting step: reboot the system. That did the trick – full crawl took under a minute. As always, a reboot fixes most of what ails Windows. Unfortunately we really would rather not be rebooting our servers after configuring search software. Microsoft still has work to do in this area.
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