This was a very annoying one. I had previously configured my development virtual machine to disable Search, Indexing, Document Conversion .. all those pesky services that sap RAM and CPU which aren’t always needed for development work.
The problem came when I wanted to turn them back on again. I was creating a new SSP and got the rather spurious error "no indexers".
This was a little odd, but I quickly realised that it meant the Index service was disabled. (annoying, because I only wanted an SSP for user profile development, but c’est la vie).
So I went to start the Windows SharePoint Services Search and *wham*… "Error"
I had a bit of a poke around the log files and found a reference to:
The call to SearchServiceInstance.Provision ("<name of server>") failed.
Well .. it took me a while to work this out but I did finally crack it. You see, I was doing this on a local virtual machine, so I rarely if ever use the full domain name. I found that I could only start the Search Service using the fully qualified "Domain\UserName" designation.
If you use just the "Username" then it didn’t work and you got the odd error above!
Very strange, another one for the archives I guess.
Yep, there’s a new version of FireFox out there.
Version 3.5 includes HTML 5 support, "Private Browsing" modes (similar to what Google, Microsoft and Apple have been offering) and an upgrade to a faster JavaScript engine.
You can check all of the release notes here.