Office Sharepoint Server 2007 on Windows Server 2008...

Event ID 2436 Office Search Server
The start address <our web address> cannot be crawled
Details: Access is denied. check that the Default Content Access Account has
access to this content or add a crawl rule to crawl this content.

Searches return no results. The crawler can't crawl. There is a KB article
(952172) about this Event ID focused on removing the .txt file extension from
the file exclusion list. In our brand new installation the .txt file
extension was never on that list to begin with. The robots.txt file does
exist and it only includes some folders like /images. I don't think that's it
this time. It would seem to be an access and permissions issue.

I've configured every different Default Content Access Account I can think
of, from an ordinary user with no admin priv to the ultimate domain admin
account. Still the same error. Crawl rules didn't change anything either.

Can someone please provide details on how to choose what account to use for
the DCAA and what permissions to give that account, etc, etc. Detailed steps
please, I'm at the end of my rope...

Thanks
Bill

Bill, the crawler account is determined when you actually configured the
search service. If you go into Central administration, Services on Sever and
look at the search properties, chat account did you use? Then be sure that
this account has read permission to any source you want crawled.

yeah, that's just it. how do we ensure that any particular account has read
permissions on content. the content is in the database not the file system.

"Daniel A. Galant" wrote:
[..]

If you check your web application policies in Central Administration, the
crawler should be granted read access to the web application. this will
allow it to crawl any content associated with that web application.

Right, found that. It does have full read there. The same crawler is able to
crawl the sp admin site with no problems too. Are there any other
possibilities? Other ways to narrow down what's really wrong?

"Daniel A. Galant" wrote:
[..]

I finally found the answer, hopefully this will help someone. It requires
tweaking the registry to disable another of Microsoft's hair-brained
so-called security features that supposedly applies to IIS6 on windows server
2003 SP1 but actually applies to IIS7 on windows server 2008 SP1. Follow
method 1 to DisableLoopbackCheck as detailed here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861

Thanks to Daniel and the community here.

"Bill Coulter" wrote:
[..]