Cant crawl a site when you know that you should be able to

I had a situation where I couldn’t crawl a site at work. Everything seemed fine, all the permissions were there but still I could work it out and it was starting to drive me crazy.

There are a couple of things to check if you do find yourself in this situation:

Check Default Content Access Account

Default Content Access account

First thing would be to check that the default access account has access to the Site Collection or the Web Application that you are trying to index. The Default Content Access Account is in SSP->Search Administration->Default Content Access Account.

Give that a try, if no luck then continue on..

Check Crawl Rules

Crawl Rules options page

With the new infrastructure upgrade you can also now specify authentication within a crawl rule which can be really,really handy especially for different types of authentication such as Form Credentials, Cookies and Certificates as seen above, but it can also override your default content access account permissions so make sure that there isn’t a crawl rule that matches your URL and overrides the default content access account to something that doesn’t have permission to the site, site collection or web application.

Check Policy for Web Application

Policy for Web Application

Another thing to check might be the Policy for Web Application settings to ensure that the Search Crawling account has access to that as well, if not either add in the account that is the default access account or another account that you are using to crawl

If all else fails…

So if this is all set up and you still are getting an ‘Access Denied’ error which is driving you crazy try looking at KB896861 which is what I needed to do. Essentially the issue occurs because of the loopback settings on a server. I actually had to disable the loopback altogether (method 2 in the article) to get the damn thing to crawl.

Hopefully this helps you in your time of need!

Related Links

• http://sharepoint-sezai-moss-2007.blogspot.com/2009/04/cant-crawl-sites-cant-access-sites-on.html

• http://www.toddklindt.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=107

• http://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/blogs/adawson/archive/2009/03/26/access-is-denied-when-crawling-content-on-moss-2007-hosted-on-windows-server-2008.aspx

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