Ryan McCutchen

When starting services on a MOSS installation you could potentially run into an issue starting the Windows SharePoint Services Search service. If you get an error in the event log stating something about the file name or extension is too long, it is most likely due to the fact that the content database is referencing the FQDN name of the database server. You will see this in the configuration page of the service settings when the content database field looks something like WSS_Search_myserver.my.domain.com. Initially I thought changing it in the settings page at the time of starting the service would fix it, but alas it did not. The server is still being referenced by the FQDN. The easiest way to change this is with the following stsadm script:

stsadm -o renameserver -newservername <server name without fully qualifying> -oldservername <server name with the FQDN>

The service started right up for me after that. As always if this is a production environment....or any you don't want to screw up then do a back up first.