Disclaimer: Backup. It is that simple and in this case backup your Windows Registry. You can do this through Regedit (File / Export) or via a System State backup. Regardless of how you backup iLogix Computer Solutions can not be accountable for crashing your server due to a registry error. The registry on a Windows computer, including a server, is a configuration database and as such you can cause serious problems to your computer that could prevent it booting and cause you to reinstall the operating system. Think ahead and plan.
We recently helped a customer who had upgraded their File Servers from SAMBA running on Linux to Microsoft Windows Server 2022. As soon as the upgrade was finished they had access to all the advancements of the Microsoft Platform such as ACLs, File Server Resource Manager, File Screens, Auditing, Quotas, Effective Access and conditional access policies however they told us that they could no longer search files based on the content of PDF files.
Of all things!
The issue was that they stored proof of deliveries in PDF content and their accounts department was heavily reliant on content searches when clients queried invoices. The first thing the Accounts department would do is prove receipt of the goods.
The first thing iLogix Computer Solutions did was to ask the user to demonstrate the issue. Once we saw this we was able to recreate the same issue. As a workaround we set up offline folders for her which allowed her to search content on cached PDFs on her local PC, offline folders is a feature of Windows that caches server shares locally so you can work on files shares even if the network is unavailable, such as taking a laptop out of the office. This is of course just a workaround on folders that she was in urgent need of searching. The file Server resource was so big it spanned multiple servers and she did not have a PC hard drive big enough to cache all of it, plus, she was not the only users that needed this.
You can find your Windows Search options in the control panel under Indexing Options, of course.
Firstly we checked that PDF content was being indexed. Open Indexing Options and click Advanced / File Types.
Find PDF in the list and ensure that "Index Properties and File Contents" is selected.
After this we used a little known Windows tip.
Open your registry editor and make sure that HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.pdf\PersistentHandler the (Default) value points to the Windows PDF Persistent Handler {1AA9BF05-9A97-48c1-BA28-D9DCE795E93C}
Then go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Search\PluginResourceData\{6C337B26-3E38-4F98-813B-FBA18BAB64F5} and make sure that PenaltyBox is set to 0. If it is set to 3 like this one was it means that PDF Search is disabled.
Go to Control Panel Indexing options Advanced and click Rebuild to rebuild the index, then give it some time.
After the index completed its rebuild PDF content was searchable.
If the issue reoccurs try creating a new DWORD ShutoffThreshold under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Search\PluginResourceData and set it to hex ffffffff.
We like happy customers at iLogix. We are certified on Microsoft Windows Server as well as Microsoft Azure and Intune.