Reconfigure A Rogue SharePoint 2010 Search Service

Hello again to all the readers of my blog. I haven’t been around lately, but I have a good excuse for that: I was getting married. Now, as the feasts are over, I’ll be back in business as usual.

Today I’ve stumped across a puzzling problem with an existing SharePoint 2010 installation. The problem was that the Search Service Application was misbehaving, giving weird errors of not being able to connect to itself.

After some extensive googling, this forum post led to a clue: remove the service application altogether and rebuild it again from scratch. The command to remove the service application is done in the old reliable STSADM:

> _stsadm.exe –o deleteconfigurationobject –id <GUID\_of\_the\_service\_application>_

That did the trick! After that, make a new search service application in Central Administration and you are good to go.

Note: the same forum post mentioned another post, which has a script to remove the service applications, for the PowerShell-savvy among you.