Knowing a little bit about your server farm is going to be important in answering this question - but I'm also going to explain something about the "preferred server for timer jobs" setting.
Much of this is managed by something called "Timer Job Lock Management", which basically occurs at the content database level and determines which server will have administrative locks on the databases. There are three different types of "locks" which
can occur with respect to timer jobs.
- First is the preferred lock. If the "preferred server for timer jobs" setting is configured, the selected server will have a "lock" on the timer jobs in the content database, and other servers will not touch it unless..
- Next, the Secondary lock. If the preferred server for timer jobs" setting is configured, AND the selected server has been determined to be unavailable due to the "Timer Job Lock Management" timer job (runs every 1 minute by default) determining that
the selected server is not available, then another server will be elected to have a lock on the timer jobs in the content database until the selected server becomes available
- Third is "no lock". In this case, no specific server has been assigned to be responsible for all timer jobs in the database. In that case, timer jobs will be allocated and executed by available servers.
To come back to why you're unable to select any servers in the drop-down, what is your server farm configuration? Are you using a single-server with integrated database deployment?
For your "help search". There is a separate dropdown control (on the same screen, up 2 controls):
"Select Microsoft SharePoint Foundation search server"
Providing you have the "SharePoint Foundation Search" service started on at least one server in the farm, this should be available in the dropdown, and this should provide you with help search functionality.
I hope that helps.
Roger Cormier
Microsoft
Premier Field Engineer, SharePoint
Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rcormier/
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