Office SharePoint Server Search Service stuck

May 29, 2008 6 Comments

How did I get here? Sometime this morning I was trying to fix an issue with the people search feature not working. While trying to correct that, I got stuck in the limbo of Office SharePoint Server Search remaining in the status of “Stopping” without ever getting to the status of “Stopped”. Apparently this is a common issue, but the recommended fix for it, running “stsadm -o osearch -action stop”, isn’t working for me. 


Changed the “Log On As” to Local System, disabled the service and rebooted. Once back up, re-enabled the service, started it, stopped it. Still showed as Stopping in the Central Administration. Re-ran the command “stsadm -o osearch -action stop”. YAY!


Tried to start: An unhandled exception occurred in the user interface.Exception Information: OSearch (DOMAIN\ShareAdmin)

Change the “Log On As” back to the (DOMAIN\ShareAdmin) and start the service from Central Administration > Operations > Services on Server. Everything was back up. 

Below is a link to one of the options I tried. While it didn’t fixe this particular issue, I’m sure this will come in handy in the future.  

SharePoint Services Timer Service File System Cache

Resetting the file system cache have resolved many issues I had in my SharePoint farm. Microsoft tech support gave me this resolution to fix some issues I had with Usage Analysis. I perform this operation first if I get stuck with any issues related to timer jobs. Good times!

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6 Responses to Office SharePoint Server Search Service stuck

  1. Syed says:
    March 18, 2009 at 5:33 pm

    Hi,
    This blog post really helped me out. Thanks alot for posting it.

    Reply
  2. Dave says:
    April 14, 2009 at 3:48 pm

    Thanks for the write up. It was very useful.

    Reply
  3. Jill says:
    June 12, 2009 at 3:34 pm

    Thanks a ton – your steps worked for me as well!!

    Reply
  4. Matt says:
    September 8, 2009 at 5:52 pm

    The other option if the osearch service is hung in stopping but you know your service accounts (should) be good and don’t want to change Log On info….

    If stsadm -o osearch -action stop is stuck (as illustrated in screen shot above)

    1) CTRL-C to get back to a DOS prompt
    2) Run “net stop osearch”. This completed with sucess HOWEVER SharePoint CA site still shows stopping.
    3) Rerun stsadm -o osearch -action stop. I know you just stopped the service, but this time SharePoint will also show success and the CA site will correctly reflect service status as stopped.

    Of course, the reason we’re having stopping issues suggest deeper permissions or config issues, but on this thread of hung services I hope the above helps.

    Reply

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