Search configuration - Failed to configure progation --> Query/Index Server

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Error : In multi server Moss 2007 farm environment, you might see error "Failed to Configure progation share"

 

Reason : This problem occurs mostly when your Office SharePoint Service Search is not working (or configured correctly). Follow the steps below,

 

1. Stop Office SharePoint Service on all servers ( StsAdm.exe -o osearch -action stop)

2. Start the office SharePoint Service Search service on index server first

3. Start the office SharePoint Service Search servicve on role query

4. on the command line type "StsAdm.exe -o osearch -propogationlocation "d:\Program files\Microsoft office Servers\12.0\data\Office Server\applications"

 

after couple of minutes - reconfigure your SSP and check the event log.

 

Architecture:

 

what is continuous propagation?

 

Instead of copying the entire index from the Index server to the search server, every time a change is made to that index, now we can find that as information is written to Content Store on the Search Server, it is continously propagated to the query server. In other words, it is the act of ensuring all the indexes on the query server are kept up to date by copying the indexes from the index servers. The faster you can update the indexes on the Query server, the faster you'll be able to give updated information to users in the result set.

 

Continuous propagation has the following characterstics:

  • Indexes are propagated to the query servers as they are updated within 30 seconds after the shadow index is written to the disk.
  • The update size must be at least 4 KB. No Maximum size limitation
  • Metadata is not propagated to the query servers. Instead, it is directly written to the SSP's Search SQL database.
  • There are no registry entries to manage, and these configurations are hard coded.

 

Note : Propagation uses the NetBIOS name of the query servers to connect. Hence, it is not a best practice to place a firewall between your Query server and Index server, due to number of ports you would need to open on the firewall.