I ran into a problem with the Search Administration link whilst working with a customer the other day. They had successfully upgraded their MOSS 2007 environment from SP1 to SP2 – or so they thought!
Service pack 2 for MOSS 2007 contains a large number of fixes and some UI changes, one of these is a flashy new dashboard that can be used to manage search. This is accessed using the “Search Administration” link that can be found within the Shared Service Provider (SSP) Administration site.
I’ve previously seen botched upgrades not add this link, I Blogged a fix to this here – http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/fromthefield/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=0ce77946%2D1e45%2D4b43%2D8c74%2D21963e64d4e1&ID=80
In this particular case the link was there but it didn’t work and generated the dreaded “Unexpected Error” when the link was clicked. To troubleshoot this I made the following configuration changes to the Web.config to (hopefully) provide me with a detailed error message:
· Open the web.config for the Web application in question, in this case the SSP administration site. The following change will not be automatically propagated so will need to be made manually to all other servers hosting the site if required. It's also advisable to take a backup of this file first – just in case!
· Search for CallStack
· Set this to “true”
· Search for customErrors
· Set this to “off”
· Save the web.config
· MOSS 2007 should now present more in-depth error messages within the browser
System.ArgumentException: Could not find the sitemap node with URL '/SearchAdministration.aspx'
After much scratching my head and inspecting the 12 hive it turned out that the layouts.sitemap file within the _app_bin directory of the root of the SSP site had not been upgraded on one of the servers hosting the SSP site and was still using the SP1 version of the file. I could tell this because the file was 31KB in size on the faulty server but 35KB on all other servers.
The SSP administration site had been configured with a host header and DNS configured to resolve this site to a specific server rather than load balancing the requests across all servers hosting the site - in this case all requests for the SSP administration site were being routed to the faulty server.
To resolve the issue I copied this file from one of the other web front end servers (that was working) performed an IISRESET and then the search administration link magically worked.
Morale of the story, test all new functionality on all servers within the farm when you deploy a service pack or cumulative update.
Brendan Griffin