SharePoint 2010 Server Search Troubleshooting

“The search service is not able to connect to the machine that hosts the administration component”

The Fpweb.net SharePoint 2010 research team was having an issue with SharePoint Server 2010 search services. No matter what we would do, how we would install it, or how we got our pre-reqs, we would end up with the following error:

System Status Crawl status The search service is not able to connect to the machine that hosts the administration component. Verify that the administration component ‘8d5c3da9-d70c-41f3-88af-32a4d142aaf4′ in search application ‘Search Service Application’ is in a good state and try again.

Unfortunately, in trying to track down this error message, I didn’t really come up with much at all. I found a few ideas on this thread on technet, but none of the suggestions solved our 2010 search error. After attempting to configure SharePoint search with the command line, manually, with the wizard, employing Merlin the wizard (or was he a sorcerer…?); I did the next best thing – I took some time off to enjoy the holidays and proceeded to eat myself into a food coma.

Amazing things can happen when you eat until you cannot eat anymore. Your body’s physical functions pretty much stop and you are only left with thoughts… and ideas! Figuring that this problem could not be that widespread (due to the lack of information out there), and that I was getting it on every 2010 installation, I knew I was missing something. I’d tried everything obvious, but in the haze of my food coma it dawned on me that I had used the same 2008 server installation media on every failed build.

After returning to work, I grabbed a copy of our production 2008 server bits, (I had been working with an MSDN copy for testing), used the same pre-reqs I had downloaded in the aforementioned failed attempts, installed SharePoint 2010, spun up the SharePoint search service, and it worked without a hitch. Problem solved… sort of. I got a copy of SP 2010 from MSDN with sp2 baked in just to verify my sanity. As I expected, it worked as well.

What’s the moral of this story about SharePoint 2010 search installations? If you run into this issue, it very well could be your server bits. Try another copy if you have them laying around. It worked for the Fpweb.net team!