"This Site:" Search not working or giving any results

So for the past 2 months I was absolutely boggled with an issue that I had. The "This Site:" search was not working for me at all. I created a separate search site and those searches were fine, people search was fine but "This Site:" search scope was not working at all.

I looked around, saw many individuals that had this issue and various solutions that I tried but didn't work for me. I didn't really want to go ahead and create a new SSP etc etc. When I did find a solution it was quite simple to begin with so here goes:

Web application/IIS settings:


Short name for intranet: "http://intranet"
FQDN: "http://intranet.company.com"

IIS:
port 80; host header - intranet

AAM (Alternet Access Mapping):
Internal URL Zone Public URL for Zone
http://intranet Default http://intranet
http://intranet.company.com Internet http://intranet.company.com

So I went to my SSP> Search Settings> Content sources and edit the content source. (I only have 1)

And these are the addresses I put in there:

http://intranet/
sps3://intranet/

Apart from this I don't have any crawl rules setup at all. You can run a full crawl after this and see if it gives you search results when you use "This Site:" search on any of the sites in the site collection(s).

SharePoint Crawl Paused Issue/Error

I went into Search Settings to begin a full crawl but I got a pop up saying:

“the crawl has been paused by search system while a new query server is added. after the new query server is online, the crawl will be resumed”

After mucking around a bit I just did an IIS reset in CMD:
iisreset /noforce

Tried to begin the crawl again and it worked!

Office Sharepoint Server search service - an unhandled exception occurred

Environment:
1 box/Server with Full MOSS installation - Sv1
1 box/Server with Full MOSS installation - Sv2
1 box/Server SQL 2005 - sql1

Sv1 has CA hosted on it.

Requirement:

I wanted to run indexing on Sv1 and query on Sv2.

Steps Taken:

I would go to in the CA

• Operations>Services on Server and then select Sv1
• The WSS search Help was already started (from before)
• I clicked on Office SharePoint server search service and made sure to only check mark "User server for indexing"
• Fill in the rest of the info as desired and go ok.
• I would then click on the "Start" link for OSSS service and make sure "User server for indexing" is checked off and click OK.
• Once the service had begun on Sv1 I changed the server to Sv2.
• Whenever I would click on Office SharePoint server search service or Start I would get a page with "unhandled exception....401 unauthorized"

Resolution

After searching and loosing lots of hair I still had not come across anything over the majestic web to help me figure out how to run indexing on one server and search queries on another. Its ironic a lot of posts talk about the best practices and how querying and indexing should be separate but don't talk about how to make it separate.

Finally came across a post speaking which spoke about how to deal with the issue I was having and starting the OSSS service using old faithful Stsadm :D

So I went to ran CMD and went to the directory with stsadm and wrote the following command in:
stsadm -o osearch -action list
SV1
Status : Online
Role : Index

SV2
Status : Disabled
Role : None

In order to enable the right role on the Sv2 server you need to log into Sv2 server and go to CMD and the proper STSadm directory and write the following

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN>stsadm -o osearch role Query -farmserviceaccount ittest\administrator -farmservicepassword ******

After that it should say Operation successful.

Dun't forget to type in stsadm -o osearch -action start to bring the service online.
So now if you were to type in stsadm -o osearch -action list it should display this:

SV1
Status : Online
Role : Index

SV2
Status : Online
Role : Query

And there you have it your query service on Sv2 and index service on Sv1.

I hope this helps!