Phonetic / Liguistic Search for People is Not Working in SP2013 Farm

Question

Phonetic search is not working for us in a SharePoint Server 2013 farm. We are also seeing the following in the event logs (I the query text):

04/17/2014 11:40:15.89     NodeRunnerQuery1-e68fd887-7cea- (0x144C)     0x1CC0     Search     Fuzzy Name Search    ajyfa Unexpected     CCANameProjector : Exception:Exception : Access to the path 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\15.0\Data\Office Server\CanonicalResources\ProjectionModels\EN_EN.mdl' is denied. encountered while attempting to  load the Projection Model Catalog C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\15.0\Data\Office Server\CanonicalResources\ProjectionModels\EN_EN.mdl for Language : en encountered while attempting to load the projection model. c32b889c-945b-6009-d6db-364f153d0b5c

04/17/2014 11:40:15.89     NodeRunnerQuery1-e68fd887-7cea- (0x144C)     0x1CC0     Search     Fuzzy Name Search    ajyg3 Monitorable     FuzzyNameSearcher : Failed to load the projection model for language: en.   c32b889c-945b-6009-d6db-364f153d0b5c

04/17/2014 11:40:15.89     NodeRunnerQuery1-e68fd887-7cea- (0x144C)     0x1CC0     Search     Fuzzy Name Search    ajyg7 Monitorable     FuzzyNameSearcher : Exception: Failed to fetch the projection model for query: <removed> in language: en-US    c32b889c-945b-6009-d6db-364f153d0b5c

04/17/2014 11:40:15.89     NodeRunnerQuery1-e68fd887-7cea- (0x144C)     0x1CC0     Search     Fuzzy Name Search    ajyem Monitorable     CCAPeopleCoreNameSearchProducer : Fuzzy name analysis failed for query: <removed>. Check the logs for more information.     c32b889c-945b-6009-d6db-364f153d0b5c

04/17/2014 11:40:16.57     NodeRunnerQuery1-e68fd887-7cea- (0x144C)     0x1CC0     Search     Query Processing     aiziq Monitorable     Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Query.Pipeline.Processing.PersonalizationDataInjectionEvaluator : Field: PersonalizationData 'null'. Personalized Search queries will not work c32b889c-945b-6009-d6db-364f153d0b5c

Any ideas? I am checking file permissions with TechNet, but everything appears in order so far.

Answer 1

It sounds like the security for the application directories has changed. Does the directory exist on the offending server? If so, do you have a group policy that is being applied to the service account?

One quick test (and only a test) you can do is add the Service Account that is running that instance of NodeRunner to the local Admins group on the failing server. Restart the server and try the People Crawl again. If it works then it's a permissions issue. Be sure to remove the account after you are done testing as this is not a fix.

Either way, I would say there are two things you can try. One is to rerun PSCONFIG -cmd -SecureResources (or Initialize-SPResourceSecurity in PowerShell, which somehow does not do exactly the same) the other is to recreate the Query Component.