I was chatting today with Agnes Molnar (the only person I know that I know in Hungary) about a strange search configuration problem.  Namely, search was missing from the "services on server" display (via Central Admin -> Operations -> Services on Server).

I had a look at a functional VM on my own machine and together, we determined that search was not installed on that server.  There are probably a few ways to do this, but we did it by confirming that "Office SharePoint Server Search" was missing from the list of services via Start -> Administrative Tools -> Services.

Oddly, the associated .exe *was* on the server ("C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\12.0\Bin\mssearch.exe").

I did a quick search and found this blog entry: http://msmvps.com/blogs/obts/archive/2006/10/19/189466.aspx

That’s an email chain with this key point:

"I solved this problem. It was my mistake. I choose "Web front end" instead of "Complete" during install."

This was promising, but we weren’t sure if the installer had actually picked WFE instead of complete when installing MOSS. 

We checked for the first (earliest) version of the PSCDiagnostics* file in the 12 hive log directory and in there, we found that the installer had, in fact, configured this server to be a web front end.  End of story and it had a happy ending.

(Somewhere along the line, Bob Fox got involved, but all I remember him contributing to the discussion was a comment about Fable 2).

Update: Agnes blogs about this subject here: http://dotneteers.net/blogs/aghy/archive/2008/11/06/wfe-vs-complete-installation.aspx

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