Friday, September 14, 2007

MOSS is scary!

Don't know if I'm the only one who finds this scary. But in a farm, MOSS is modifying the hosts file of your servers. I had a really hard time figuring this one out actually. I was just playing around with different roles for each server. And then all of a sudden when I tried to use a share of one of the webservers from an indexserver I got the following error : "Logon Failure: The target account name is incorrect". If you google this error you will find information about wrongly configured DNS settings.
So with this information I decided to ping the webserver and see what IP I got back.. and you probably would have guessed it .. I got the IP back of the index server! Argh! So I logged on the webserver and try to ping itself and then ping the indexserver and all the IP's were fine. Back to the index server!

  • I checked all the DNS settings via the TCP/IP settings
  • Ran a tool called "netdiag" to check whether the server was properly configured in the domain

Nothing 'odd' or 'weird' was showing in the reports so I was getting a bit hopeless.. and then I thought: "Noo.. not the hosts file! It can't be!" With this as a result :

# For example:
#
#      102.54.94.97     rhino.acme.com          # source server
#       38.25.63.10     x.acme.com              # x client host
10.10.4.238    webservercomputername    # Added by Office SharePoint Server Search (9/13/2007 3:52 PM).
10.10.4.238    webserverhostname    # Added by Office SharePoint Server Search (9/13/2007 3:52 PM).
127.0.0.1    localhost    

See why I'm scared? ;) And that's why the share didn't work! It was just pointing to itself (although I should have seen the shares from the index server instead of that error).
The solution is just to modify the host file yourself and put in the proper IP.

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4 comments:

NoOneAtHome said...

This is by design if you select a dedicated web front end for crawling in your search service settings in Central Administration. Here is a TechNet article that explains it, http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/87e0397a-ddab-442f-91cd-8acf0c0c712b1033.mspx?mfr=true

Robin Meuré said...

Dpuggie,

thanks for the link! Explains a lot ;) Although it still remains scary!

Unknown said...

Modifying the hosts file is not the solution, MOSS just changes it back.

Ova (Excuse My Reading) said...

yes, I tried modifying the hosts file but moss just changes it again..