Sharepoint Services 3 Search Broken

Question

I am getting the following error for WSS3

Event Type: Error Event Source: Windows SharePoint Services 3 Search Event Category: Gatherer Event ID: 2424 User: N/A Description: The update cannot be started because the content sources cannot be accessed. Fix the errors and try the update again.

Context: Application 'Search', Catalog 'index file on the search server Search'

Search used to work in the past - I've made sure that it is not using any built in accounts. I've tried creating new accounts as well and reverting to using an older account.

Still no luck.

TIA.

Answer 1

A month or two ago we ran into a similar problem after installing .NET 3.5 SP1 on our SharePoint 2007 server. Our problem was caused by NTLM loopback authentication. We fixed the problem using Method 2 as described in this KB article:

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

Answer 2

I also ran into this for a while because we were using basic authentication. For the crawler to work, it has to be able to use integrated authentication to get to the site. Also, I found that to get it to work, I had to set up the default web application to use integrated authentication and then use an extended web application for other authentication schemes.

Answer 3

A couple of questions:

-When did you start to get this message?

-Did anything change before you started to get this message?

I have seen this error when the WSS Search service account is set to use the Network Service account (which you say it is not, but check out http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927012), and have also seen it if the Alternate Access Mappings were not setup correctly (see more here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288173.aspx)

-Sean