Search Service Application is inaccessible - “Access denied for SharePoint Farm Admin”

Question

I am unable to access Search Service Application in Central Admin 2010 with SharePoint Farm Administrator credentails. I was able to access SSA with SharePoint Farm Admin credentials since SharePoint installation but recently I am encountering "access denied" error.

FYI, recently our client deployed a web application with claim based authentication and rest all web applications are already using classic mode authentication including Central Admin 2010 site. I remember after this web application deployment the search service application got inaccessible. Kindly advice if this is causing the issue or something else.

I have reset the IIS, changed the SSA application pool, added "SharePoint Farm Admin" to Permissions and Administrators in Search Service Application but still the issue exist.

Thanks & Best Regards.

Answer 1

Can you click the administrators ribbon button when you select the service application and make sure that your currently logged in user account is listed with access?

Answer 2

I just answered this question here. The solution is to remove/close the webpart "Shortcuts" from the SearchAdministration.aspx page.

This can be done using powershell like:

$site = new-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite("http://path-to-central-admin:<portnumber>/")
$web = $site.OpenWeb()
$page = $web.Url + "/searchadministration.aspx"
$webpartmanager = $web.GetLimitedWebPartManager($page, [System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.PersonalizationScope]::Shared)
for($i=0;$i -lt $webpartmanager.WebParts.Count;$i++)
{
  if ($webpartmanager.WebParts[$i].title -eq "Shortcuts")
  {
     $webpartmanager.DeleteWebPart($webpartmanager.Webparts[$webpartmanager.WebParts[$i].ID])
  }
}
$web.Update();
$site.Dispose();

Save the script above as a .ps1-file and call from the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell! :)