Error "403 Forbidden" on Sharepoint Search Settings Page

Ok so I had to struggle with this error for like 48 hours, busy googling for a solution. This error came up at the same time on both our live and test environment after we were hit by the worm Microsoft reported a few days ago.

So here is how I went about sorting it out:

Using STSADMIN commands

1. I first ran stsadm -o osearch -action stop –f
2. Then stsadm -o osearch -action start -role indexquery
3. And stsadm -o execadmsvcjobs

So now I tried to access the search site and it told me that I had to assign an index server, of which I did, then I again from the index server had to run stsadm -o execadmsvcjobs.

At this point, I had to provide access to c:\windows\tasks, from the command line, on our index server for the local group WSS_WPG as follows
1. By running attrib -s c:\windows\tasks on the index server so as to be able to change the tasks system folder attributes.
2. Then I added the local group WSS_WPG with read and write access
3. And now take back the attributes of the tasks system folder to the way they were by running attrib +s c:\windows\tasks
4. Then restart the search service on the index server
5. And perform a full crawl

Depending on how big your databases are, will determine how long the crawling and computing ranking will take, ours took about 5 hours and after which, the search site for the live environment came up.

Am still struggling with the test environment search site as the tasks folder keeps on denying access when I try to ran attrib -s c:\windows\tasks

Later mates….will tell you more soon.