Alex blog about Microsoft, SharePoint and Search

For one of our customers we installed a SharePoint farm using two front-end webservers, one application server and a cluster of database servers. This installation made use of "Least privilege administration using domain user accounts". This means that for SQL Server Service, SharePoint Setup, Farm, Application Pool, Shared Service Provider, Search Service and Content Search separate domain user accounts are used with a minimum of security privileges.

After installation of the farm, creating the web application using the out-of-the-box Collaboration Portal site definition, we noticed that some components were missing on the page. In particulair the search component, the my sites link and the my links component. Strange enough going into the Central Administration or to the Shared Service Provider Administration these components appeared and were fully functional.

Checking the log files, found under the 12 hives, we discovered the following messages:

It seams that for some reason rights were not correctly set by SharePoint for accessing the databases of the Shared Service Provider. This causes the components which shows the search, the my site link and the my links not to appear. The reason could be that the security for the domain user accounts were set too low. Because we didn't do the installation of the SQL Server cluster, there could be also something in there not set correctly causing this problem.

The solution for the problem is actually not that difficult. We had to give MYDOMAIN\SPAPP01$ account, used by the machine, rights on the databases of the Shared Service Provider. You can see this in the picture above. After this change all components appeared again and were fully functional.