INTRODUCTION

Last week I had this problem where search service couldn't index my Sharepoint site. It said that access is denied and asked me to make sure that I'm using the correct content access account. The exact error message was as below:

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.)

I have done the following:
- Add the default content access account as a Farm Administrator
- Add the default content access account as a Site Collection Administrator
- Add the default content access account as SYSADMIN on ALL Sharepoint-related tables in SQL Server (including Sharepoint_Config)
- Add the default content access account as a local Administrator

I've done everything and given full access to the default content access account to everything but yet I still couldn't get rid of the problem.

SOLUTION

The solution is somehow something not too related to Sharepoint. Please check out http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861.

That's it!

I've got the following infrastructure configuration
- Proxy is set in Internet Explorer for Internet access although accessing the Intranet should bypass proxy.
- To access local resource (ie. Sharepoint instance on my local machine) I can't edit the HOSTS file freely simply because we have proxy setup. Therefore, I have to use mydomain.local suffix (eg. http://intranet-devlocal.mydomain.local/).
- When I configure the content source to use http://intranet-devlocal.mydomain.local/, it says that it can't find the Sharepoint site.
- So I had to then create an alternate access mapping with the name http://intranet-devlocal/. It could then find the Sharepoint site but I then had that access denied error.

Hope that this helps everyone who experiences the same problem.

Tommy