Profile Import Hung on Enumerating

Having recently taken over control of our SharePoint Farm from the prior administrator, one of the issues I inherited was that the Profile Import in Central Administration was not functioning correctly.

When viewing the Profile Import page, the following error mesage was displayed in red across the top of the page:

An error has occurred while accessing the SQL Server database or the Office SharePoint Server Search Service. If this is the first time have seen this message, tray again later. If this problem persists, contact your administrator.

The result was that the profile import could not be scheduled, so I was having to run it manually every morning by logging into Central Admin and kicking the job off. The downside to this was that not only was it time consuming, but from time to time the import would hang on enumerating.

The workaround for that was to restart the search service. Sometimes the service would not start and I'd have to kill the process. In extreme cases I would have to reboot the server. Not good.

While researching this issue, I found the answer at The Geek in The Pink. A major hat tip to Pink Geek, as the query posted there solved my issue and restored my Profile Import. The process is as follows:

• You'll need to query the MIPScheduledJob table in the SSP database. This is where the records for the full and incremental import jobs live. If they are missing, like mine were, you'll have to rebuild them.
• These can get deleted by running  stsadm -o deletessptimerjob, which I suspect was done by the prior admin
• To rebuild the jobs, you'll need to retrieve the original GUIDS used to identify the jobs. You can recover these GUIDs by querying the MIPObjects table in the SSP database.
• One record in that table will have a very large XML field that will contain the GUIDS for the User Profile Full Import Job and one GUID for the User Profile Incremental Import Job.
• Use the extracted GUIDs and insert two new records into the MIPScheduledJob table.

Once the job records have been recreated in the SSP database, you can login to Central Administration, go to the Profile Import page and you'll be able to configure and schedule the import jobs as designed.

Once I rebuilt the MIPScheduledJob table, the imports have run fine and I've had no further issues. You can grab the query to rebuild the table at Geek In the Pink.