I came in after the weekend to find out that someone reported the following error when trying to use my Enterprise Search page.
The search request was unable to connect to the Search Service.
As you may know, this is a very generic error that means something with Enterprise Search is really messed up. Either that or the service isn't running. I decided to check the Event Log and was pleasantly surprised to actually find something in it. Here is what I found.
Query machine 'MOSS_SERVER' has been taken out of rotation due to this error: The content index is corrupt. 0xc0041800. It will be retried in 15 seconds. Component: b1df2e81-4375-4110-b5b1-ddf3acb128bc.
Why my content index got corrupt, I don't know. In this particular case it was a development machine running on a virtual machine. Maybe there was an issue writing to the disk at some point, who knows. After doing some searching on Google, about the only solution I saw found was to remove the Office SharePoint Server Search service and recreate it. I didn't particularly like this solution, so I ended up making use of the Reset all crawled content link. Not exactly an ideal situation, but that is what I did and then I recrawled all of my content. Everything seems to be working great so far. Hopefully it will not happen again.