Search Error from 2nd Front-End Web Server

Question

I'm getting an error on when performing a search, but only from the 2nd front-end server; the search works correctly from the main server. I was wondering if anyone has seen this before or has any ideas about where to look for a solution.

I have a SharePoint 2010 farm with 1 web application. The web application runs on port 80 (http) and is extended to also run on port 443 (https). The architecture is setup so internal users can access the site a server inside our domain/firewall and external users can access the site outside our firewall on a server that is on a trusted domain.

There are 3 servers in the farm:

Server A

• Runs the Search Crawling/indexing
• Is a front-end web server
• Runs the web application on port 80 (port 443 is turned off in IIS)
• Is internal

Server B

• Is a front-end web server only
• Runs on https on port 443 (port 80 is turned off in IIS)
• Is on a trusted domain and is outside our firewall

Server C

• SQL Server

I run a full crawl and everything works fine. I browse to the site on port 80 on Server A and perform a search and everything works correctly.

Then when I browse to server B I'm able to browse all of the webs and lists, but when I try to perform a search I get an Internal Server Error. When I look in the logs this is the error that is display for every search attempt:

User Profile Application Proxy failed to retrieve partitions from User Profile Application: Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileApplicationNotAvailableException: No User Profile Application available to service the request. Contact your farm administrator. at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileApplicationProxy.get_ApplicationProperties() at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileApplicationProxy.get_PartitionIDs() at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileApplicationProxy.IsAvailable(SPServiceContext serviceContext)serviceContext)

The fact that the search works correctly from Server A makes me think the search service and user profile are set up correctly. I don't know if it is related to networking/firewall or some configuration change I'm missing to allow searching from a second front-end server.

Anyone have any ideas on what could be causing this issue?

Answer 1

I found the error, it turned out to be related to a firewall blocking necessary ports. Microsoft Techinal Support helped point me to this TechNet article that describes the ports and protocols that need to be opened: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262849.aspx

Once we opened ports 32843 (http) and 32844 (https) the issue was resolved and search starting working. So it was a simple issue of the second front-end web server was unable to communicate to the web service applications from the other server.