Sharepoint uses SSL behind the scenes

Here's another tidbit that I wasn't aware of. We have been having issues getting Search to function on one of our WFE/query servers. It appeared to be configured exactly as the other, but continued to show Error on Search Administration page. After an upgrade to SP2, we saw a different error message for this server any time we tried to activate MOSS Search.

Unable to connect to *SERVER* for application SharedServicesProvider. This error might occur if the server is not responding to client requests, the firewall or proxy configuration is preventing the server from being contacted, or the search administration Web service is not running on the server.

It turns out, that SharePoint partly uses SSL name resolution in the background between farm servers. So, if the following conditions are true and you still can't get Search to function properly on one of your query servers you may want to take a look at this. the self-issued certificate that is used by the Office Server Web Services can become corrupted

• The server that is running Office SharePoint Server 2007 has the query role in a server farm.
• The server farm was updated with Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (SP1).
• The roles of the query server and the index server are not on the same server in the server farm.

After recreating the self-issued SSL certificate, the error went away. Hope it helps someone!