I just have to share this problem I ran into this week and just couldn’t find the solution for. I recently installed and configured new Sharepoint MOSS 2007 farm. It has two servers, one server hosts all services and the other is a plain WFE. After a week or so in production the search server decided to give up and die. Everything looked fine and dany, it was running and I could start/stop it through “services on server” in central admin. But when trying to access the search service settings in the SSP it gave me this informative error:

The search service is currently offline. Visit the Services on Server page in SharePoint Central Administration to verify whether the service is enabled. This might also be because an indexer move is in progress.

It was running but offline. I had no reoccuring errors in the event log but trying to open the settings through SSP it gave me a cryptic error and when checking log file there was another the another informative error (NOT):

Fail to obtain crawl status. Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.DeletedConcurrencyException: Object e26da097-50ff-4386-b3f6-2b2b30f73b96 not found.

I tried restarting the services. Ran the Sharepoint repair tool. Verified the service accounts. Tried everything I could find on Google, which was quite a lot. Nothing could resurrect the search service from its either offline or moving state. Before going through the tedious work of re-installing the entire farm I disconnected both servers from the farm and re-connected them to the same farm. I cheered like a little girl on her first alcohol buzz when the search service was once again operational. It saved me plenty of sleep! If you are unfortunate enough to encounter the same problem, i hope this will save you some sleep too.

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