The SharePoint 2010 search privileges issue

One of our clients took place the following situation. All users can’t find anything via SharePoint Search center.

The SharePoint Search Service Application was successfully created, The Content was crawled and indexed (index contains about 10 thousands documents).

Symptoms:

• If you try to find something search results always is empty,
• Search results is not empty only If you run a browser with the SharePoint Central Administration Pool Account.
• You can also observe empty scopes in site collection’s options except the People Scope (Url: /_layouts/viewscopes.aspx),

The solution was found here.

This is an insufficient privileges issue. An account which was used for the Search Service Application Pool had no privileges to read user properties from Active Directory. This information need for a security trimming feature of the SharePoint Search.

For resolving the issue you need to add the SharePoint Search Application Pool Account to the Windows Authorization Access group by using the Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in.

And, as usual, I hate it!

CryptographicException from OWSTIMER.EXE

How often have you seen this window?

Every day, I believe. So, this is not a bug! This is a feature. Some quotes from our gurus:

Stefan Goßner: The problem here is that the encryption key was created on a specific thread which was impersonated under a specific users account. When the .NET Finalizer processes the encryption key while the timer service shuts down it executed on a different thread which is not impersonated - so the key does not exist and you get an exception like "keyset does not exist".

Paul Andrew: If you see this error message from SharePoint 2010 you can relax, nothing bad is happening. When SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 are both installed on the same machine you may see this error every 24 hours. This occurs when the OWSTimer service has a regular process recycle and in the shutdown of the old process an exception is raised. The exception doesn’t interfere with the normal process shutdown and recycle and is only ever seen if you have a JIT debugger installed on the machine. You should never see this error on a production SharePoint 2010 server, because you should not be installing Visual Studio 2010 on those servers. You can safely ignore these exceptions and close the window, or leave it there. You actually cannot debug the process, because it will already have been closed by the time you click the button and start your debugger.

And you can only disable visual studio debugging feature If you want to get rid of this annoying thing.

More information:

• Tess Fernandes: ASP.NET Crash: .Security.Cryptography.CryptographicException,
• Paul Andrew: Benign OWSTimer unhandled exception popup – System.Security.Cryptographic.CryptographicException,
• Stefan Goßner: Common problem with SharePoint 2010: System.Security.Cryptography.CryptographicException - Keyset does not exist

And, of course, I hate it!