A couple of months ago I was happily building a client’s SharePoint Server 2010 farm when I stumbled at Search. The Service Application provisioned fine, but when I pushed out topology changes I started to have problems. Later, these problems returned in different forms, but the root cause appears to have been consistent. In this post I will review the symptoms, the single fix and the reason why this issue emerged in this environment. I’ll also look at some unexpected permission changes that occur when new servers receive Search Service Instances.