I have a small server farm with separate physical sql server. Due to the timing of availability of the second front-end server hardware, we are building the Index server first. We are enforcing SSL for our Portal. The Portal has been restored from a different environment using the spsbackup. I am able to add the new server to the farm. I am then able to move the Index and Job roles to the new server.
When I navigate to the Portal's searching and indexing page, I see an error message under each section (i.e. content indexes, content sources, search scopes). The error states cannot contact the indexing server and shows the server name of the server assigned the role.
After digging around and reinstalling SharePoint with no fix, I decided to add the default content access service account to the local administrator group. That fixed our issue in the search and indexing screens. We successfully rebuilt the indexes.
Now we were receiving a "path not found error" in the event log as the indexes were not propagating to the front-end server. We added the same service account to the local administrator group on the front-end server and the propagation completed successfully.
MS documentation states to add this service account to the Power Users group. This doesn't seem to be sufficient for our scenario. When I get some free time, I need to figure out if the issue is due to SSL enforcement or the fact the indexes are on a separate machine as the search indexes.
