working on my local farm today, I could not enter search settings. The error thrown was “The search service is currently offline. Visit the Services on Server page in SharePoint Central Administration to verify whether the service is enabled. This might also be because an indexer move is in progress.” This seemed very odd as the search services has never given me problems in the past. I looked in the event viewer and saw 'cannot connect to search configuration database'. SO, I looked at the database and it was fine. I checked the service, and it was fine.
Here is what I learned:
IF the database is not available when the Office SharePoint Server Search service starts, it seems it is never available again. I was running SQL maintenance while rebooting the Index server. Because the disks were thrashing, it could not connect to the Search DB. Therefore, I continually recieved this error. Simply restart the Office SharePoint Server Search WINDOWS Service (not the Search Service in Central Admin) and it should 'wire up' and start working. Obvisously, you should have already fixed the problem on the SQL Server, whether it be network latency, network down, SQL server error, or SQL overload.
Very strange error. But, maybe this will help whomever is reading this, should they see the problem.
Ben Curry, CISSP, SharePoint Server MVP
Mindsharp
http://mindsharpblogs.com/ben
http://www.microsoft.com/mspress/books/10623.aspx