One of the requirements was that all the existing URL’s remain the same with no downtime while performing migrations that took several hours to complete. With this requirement, we created web applications on alternate port numbers to perform the migrations to and then once the migrations were done.
However, once we were done with all the migrations we wanted to turn off the old IIS sites (running on the alternate ports) to preserve resources. However, upon turning off the IIS sites, our “This Site:” and “The List:” search quit working and every other search, All Sites, for instance with the search center were returning the results using the URL for the alternate port number rather than the search results using the URL we were hitting the site from. Needless to say, this caused lost of confusing for users and search results that couldn’t be used, because the URL returned was inactive. Even turning the alternate “port number” URLs back on, still didn’t resolve the problem of our search results displaying the wrong URL.
Through some trial and error we have discovered how to resolve the issue. If you have ever had similar problems stay tuned as I will post our fixes and finds over the next couple days in the next few parts to this post.