Fixing Search Index Problems with Exchange 2007
Recently we discovered an issue with Exchange Search on our Exchange 2007 server. A user encountered a problem while trying to search within the mailbox using Outlook Web Access (OWA). At the top of the page the user was shown a message stating that "results will take a long time to appear because Microsoft Exchange Search is unavailable. Results will not include matches in the e-mail body."
The user quickly asked our team to enable this feature which raised eyebrows because Exchange Search is installed and enabled by default. Initial Crawls and indexing is triggered by the creation or migration of a mailbox. The arrival of a message will only trigger an update of the index. This lead me to believe that if an initial crawl of mailbox results in a corrupted index, the updating of the index upon new messages arriving will not correct the corruption and will make this feature unavailable on a per-user basis.
The Exchange 2007 Management Shell has many powerful built-in commands for testing components. You can use the Test-ExchangeSearch command to test a mailbox's search functionality. The test will create a message, index the message and return the search time or -1 if the test was unsuccessful.
I thought it would be a good idea to create a command that will go through a group of mailboxes one by one to test the index before after the migration process. Here is what I came up with.
Get-Mailboxdatabase -Identity | Get-mailbox | Test-ExchangeSearch -indextimeout 20 | Format-table
I set the indextimeout to 20 in order to accommodate a large number of instances without taking too much time. The default value is 60 seconds but search results should be under 10 seconds.
Chris Dearie
Network Engineer
Azaleos Corporation
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