MOSS search crawl fails with "Access is denied ..."

Question

Recently the search crawler stopped working on my MOSS installation. The message in the crawl log is

Access is denied. Check that the Default Content Access Account has access to this content, or add a crawl rule to crawl this content. (The item was deleted because it was either not found or the crawler was denied access to it.)

• The default content account is an admin on the site collection that I am trying to crawl.
• Almost every result for this error on Google tells me to add the DisableLoobackCheck registry key with a value of 1. I have done this and rebooted and the error continues.
• The "Do not allow Basic Authentication" checkbox in my crawl rule screen is unchecked.

Is there anything else that could be causing this error? Something with file system or database permissions maybe?

Edit: All signs seem to indicate that the "DisableLoopbackCheck" should fix this, but it doesn't seem to work. Could I be doing something wrong when I enable this? I'm doing it in My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa, where I create a new DWORD key called DisableLoopbackCheck and give it the hex value 1.

Answer 1

It turned out not to be related to DisableLoopbackCheck. The problem was that the search was accessing the site through its external URL. You are supposedly not supposed to be able to access a site from within a server using the same URL that you use to reach it from the outside, at least in pre-SP1 MOSS. But I was doing this for about two years somehow. MS Support tells me they don't quite understand how it was ever working. So it looks like I ran into an issue that should have been manifesting all along. I'm not sure what caused it to appear suddenly, maybe some routine patching of the server. The solution was to extend the web application so it was accessible internally through the machine name, then point the crawler at that.