WSS 3.0 Search Issues and SSL

So today I had to battle some issues with WSS 3.0 search.  (yeah i know, its sad that we still have an environment running code that old)

The issue was that the search service went belly up while i was away on vacation.  It was still running, but no search results in the application.  After trying just about everything I could find online, I had an epifany of what might have gone wrong based on the errors i was seeing in the logs within the 12 hive.

Somehow the root certificate for our wildcard ssl cert was no longer trusted on the box.  After retrusting the cert within the mmc snap-in certificates, search finally worked.

I am writing this blog post merely for my own knowledge of some of the steps i took to troubleshoot the problem should something in the future arise.


Check the obvious

• Is search actually running? 
• Operations --> Services on Server --> Windows SharePoint Services Search
• Make sure the content DB is using the search server
• Application Management --> Content Databases --> Click your content db --> Pick the search server.  Sometimes you may have to set the content db to offline, hit OK, then put it back online to get things running.  Dont worry, no downtime is percieved by this.
• Force a full crawl
• stsadm -o spsearch -action fullcrawlstart

Then check the event viewer and the logs in the 12 hive for clues.

Another useful check, and the main reason i wrote this post is the following queries against the search DB.   These will give you an indication that search is working and if errors are being thrown the first query will show them to you.


select msscrawlurllog.lasttouchstart as Time, msscrawlurllog.displayurl as URL,msscrawlurllog.errorid as Error, msscrawlerrorlist.errormsg as Description
from msscrawlurllog
join msscrawlerrorlist on msscrawlurllog.errorid = msscrawlerrorlist.errorid
where msscrawlurllog.lasttouchstart >= DATEADD(mi, -5, getdate())
order by msscrawlurllog.lasttouchstart desc

SELECT [CrawlID],[RequestTime],[Status],[StartTime],[EndTime]
FROM [MSSCrawlHistory]
order by starttime desc

SELECT [HostID],[HostName],[SuccessCount],[ErrorCount],[WarningCount]
FROM [MSSCrawlHostList]