Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Propagating Content Indexes
Chapter 8: Planning Your Information Structure 167
Index propagation occurs only when the Search application and the Index application
are run on two different servers in a medium or large server farm. Propagation
happens automatically at the end of every successful update (or crawl). Before
propagation can be successful, the following conditions must be met:
■ You have configured a search service account for the server farm. This account
must have local administrator permissions on the search (destination) server.
■ The destination server is on a trusted domain.
■ There is sufficient disk space available on the destination server. For each
propagated index, allow for more than twice its size in disk space to accommodate
both the current index and the propagating index.
■ SMB (Server Message Block) traffic must be enabled between the two servers,
and if there is a firewall between them, the appropriate ports must be opened
too. These ports include the common Netbios and RPC (Remote Procedure
Call) ports.
Propagation is considered successful if the index is successfully copied to any
one search server. If you have a scenario where propagation is successful to one or
more, but not all, search servers, the search servers to which propagation failed is
taken off line, an error is logged in the event log, and the error appears on the propagation
status page.
Note If propagation fails because of lack of disk space on the destination
server, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 logs an error in the Application Log of
the Windows Server 2003 Event Viewer (event log) of both the destination
search server and the index management server.
The contents of a new index are not accessible on the search server
until propagation has been completed. The index is not accessible if propagation
fails, even if a previous propagation was successful.
Updating Content Indexes
The four methods for updating content indexes are as follows:
■ Full
■ Incremental
■ Incremental (inclusive)
■ Adaptive