Sharepoint Backup problem post SP1 – OSearch DCOM

Hi All,

I’ve just stumbled across a problem post MOSS 2007 SP1.

After applying SP1 to an existing installation and running a full catastrophic backup it fails on the shared search index item with an error regarding UnauthorizedAccessException.  The environment I am experiencing this in is a single virtual machine that is a domain controller, SQL2005 SP2, and multiple domain service accounts for the farm service account, search service, etc.

The error can be seen in the spbackup.log as:-

[5/8/2008 2:59:48 AM]: Error: Object Shared Search Index failed in event OnPrepareBackup. For more information, see the error log located in the backup directory.
    UnauthorizedAccessException: Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {3D42CCB1-4665-4620-92A3-478F47389230} failed due to the following error: 80070005.
[5/8/2008 2:59:48 AM]: Debug:    at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchApi.RunOnServer[T](CodeToRun`1 remoteCode, CodeToRun`1 localCode, Boolean useCurrentSecurityContext, Int32 versionIn)
   at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchApi..ctor(WellKnownSearchCatalogs catalog, SearchSharedApplication application)
   at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchSharedApplication.get_SearchApi()
   at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchSharedApplication.Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.Backup.IBackupRestore.OnPrepareBackup(Object sender, SPBackupInformation args)
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.Backup.SPBackup.RunPrepareBackup(SPBackupRestoreObject node)

It looks like SP1 is blasting away the permissions on the OSearch DCOM application.

I’d like to thank Jason Medero with his post and /dev/arthur for his post on this issue which lead me to confirm what they had found.

While their posts talk about manually editing the DCOM launch permissions for the OSearch application, Ali Mazaheri on his article has a far simpler solution.

Just run the following command:

stsadm -o osearch -action start

After you run this command you can browse to the permissions of the the OSearch DCOM application and confirm that the sharepoint service accounts and the WSS_ADMIN_WPG and WSS_WPG groups have been granted local launch and local activation permissions.

Note that while I found this error while trying to run a backup, my application event log was full of errors similar to what Ali describes in his article. This just demonstrates that if you have errors in your event log after applying a patch or service pack, something has gone wrong and you need to investigate it.