SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

So one of the members of support came over to discuss one of our managed service clients and their SharePoint 2007 implementation yesterday.

Now this client uses document management in a big way with a full crawl index taking approximately 40 hours to run.  So understandably it is scheduled to run once a week over the weekend with incremental crawls scheduled every 20 minutes or so to bring new files into the search results.

The Problem

Although the incremental crawl was scheduling and completing as expected.  The full crawl was missing the schedule time.

However, upon testing a manual full crawl the weekend before, this completed without issue.

The Solution

It would appear that the OWS Timer Service cache had corrupted in some way and had to be cleared out using the following method:

1. Stop the OWSTIMER service on the problem SharePoint WFE server in the farm.
2. On the problem server, navigate to:
   

   Server 2003 location: Drive:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\SharePoint\Config\GUID and delete all the XML files from the directory.
   Server 2008 location: Drive:\ProgramData\Microsoft\SharePoint\Config\GUID and delete all the XML files from the directory.

3. Delete all the XML file in the directory. NOTE: ONLY THE XML FILES, NOT THE .INI FILE.
4. Open the cache.ini with Notepad and reset the number to 1. Save and close the file.
5. Start the OWSTIMER service on the server and wait for XML files to begin to reappear in the directory.
6. IIS Reset (just for good measure)

Thanks to this blog post for some much need guidance:

http://blogs.tamtam.nl/duarte/2008/12/19/SharePoint2007TimerJobsNotWorking.aspx

If you remember way back to October last year, we solved a different issue with the same method in SharePoint 2010 when a web front-end was not responding properly after a content database restore:

https://ghamson.wordpress.com/2011/10/28/sharepoint-web-front-end-http-404-response-but-no-errors-in-the-log-sp2010-ps2010-msproject-projectserver-in/

And that’s it.  Another problem solved…