Search Crawl Issue for an Internet facing MOSS Site
Recently I was involved in the production deployment of a MOSS based Internet facing site. Just like any other site, this also had its search requirements. In the dry run of the production deployment, initially I deployed the application with Integration Authentication and then started the crawl. Post completion of this search was working fine. Since this was an Internet facing site, then as my next logical step in the deployment process was to change the settings of the Authentication of Application in Central Admin and within the Web Application permissions to Anonymous. We also removed Impersonate to true in Web.config as it was no longer required.
Later during the actual deployment, we did want to resue the things we had already done. So we did reset all the crawl entries and did a restoration of entire content db from statging environment. But now when we tried to crawl it started throwing ComInterop Exception which really worried us. A closer look at the same showed that it required an ID which had permissions for all the content in the Db to crawl and since it was anonymous and impersonate was false, it was failing. So immediately we extended the Application on another port with integrated Authentication enabled and when we crawled from here (new URL with the new port and the one with 80), everything went fine.
Though we thought everything was same from the previous to the current deployment, small settings will make a big change and we need to be careful about the same...
Thanks and Regards
PrashanthG
