I came across a rather interesting problem yesterday,
I came to know that we were not able to search the portal site since we decided to have a dedicated Search server in the farm.
The environment was
1 Application server 32 BIT Windows Server 2008 also running search query service
1 Search server 32 BIT Windows Server 2008 running Search Indexing Service
1 Database server which was SQL 2005
Interesting catch was that everything was running under FQDN
The search started getting rude to us since we added a search server to the farm and gave it an Indexer role. also the search was set crawl all the Dedicated WFE (which might not be a good idea)
First thing you have to check is the Crawl logs, which might give you a better direction, mine gave me error as - could not access the url
The site was browse able on the client and the application server
we RDP'd to the Index server and tried browsing the site & it did not show up
Tried pinging, tracert, nslookup; no response- by this time we were sure that it was a network problem
What's the catch ?
The Domain Controller was running on Windows Server 2003, which means IPv4 we saw that Sharepoint was running on Server 2008 which is IPv6.
when you give role to a server as Indexer it writes entries to the host file with the url of the sites and from there we saw that it was IPv6
we disabled the IPV6 networking layer on Sharepoint and the sites were now browseable and searchable
checkout the following links to support that :
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/215383
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc748826.aspx
Golden Point to remember:
Incase you have separate Query and Index server in the farm make sure that the site should be up and browse able on the Indexer server
