XADM: Mssearch May Block Cluster Failover from Occurring During a Crawl (288686)

SYMPTOMS

A clustered Exchange 2000 server may not fail over to the other node after a Microsoft Search (Mssearch) service content index crawl is started, even if the Mssearch service has timed out and all of the transactions have been cancelled.

An event may be logged on the failing node that indicates that the Mssearch search service has timed out. In the Cluster Administrator program, all of the resources for virtual server 1 may appear to be offline except for Mssearch. Mssearch may stay in this state indefinitely, or may appear to hang with virtual server 1 offline.

CAUSE

This problem can occur if the gatherer concludes that the crawl is still in progress, even though all of the transactions have been cancelled. The failover from node 1 to node 2 is blocked until all of the crawls are completed.

RESOLUTION

To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server. For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

301378 XGEN: How to Obtain the Latest Exchange 2000 Server Service Pack

WORKAROUND

To work around this problem, on node 1, kill the Mssearch.exe process. This allows virtual server 1 to finish failing, and virtual server 1 comes online on node 2. If there is another virtual server running on node 1, that virtual server restarts the Mssearch process again.

If you need to stop the Microsoft Search service to allow the failover to complete, you can use the following command to use the Kill.exe utility to stop the Mssearch.exe process:

kill.exe -F ProcessID

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server.

This problem was first corrected in Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server Service Pack 1.

MORE INFORMATION

For additional information about how to use the Kill.exe utility, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

171773 How to Eliminate a Hung Process without Restarting the Computer