Error in the Site Data Web Service. (Value does not fall within the expected range.)
After setting up a new web application for a new portal I faced a crawling problem of the new site collection.
Description:
Right after starting the crawler it stops, giving 2-3 error messages, all with the same syntax:
Error in the Site Data Web Service. (Value does not fall within the expected range.)
The crawl log was the only place the error was logged, with no additional information regarding the cause of the problem.
Searching the web came up with very little solutions, while only one of them seemed to apply to our case:
1. stsadm -o export -url http://intranet/sites/it -filename D:\it.back.11.21.08.cmp -versions 2
2. Delete the site collection
3. stsadm -o import -url http://intranet/sites/it -filename D:\it.back.11.21.08.cmp -updateversions 2 –nofilecompression
(See here)
While option 1 and 3 are reasonable, deleting the site collection didn’t apply since the portal was already in production stage. (along with the fact faze 1 didn’t pass either due to some technical issues… so I had to look for a better way to solve the issue)
After opening a support ticket, Microsoft’s support team came up with a nicer solution:
First of all, the cause behind this problem:
Corrupted SIDs in the UserInfo table
Solution:
1. Run the following sql query using your moss content database:
Select tp_login, tp_systemid, tp_deleted from userinfo where len(ltrim(rtrim(tp_systemid))) <25 and tp_deleted = 0
2. Give some kind of permissions to the root site of the site collection to all the users returned by the query, except system users:
NT AUTHORITY\authenticated users
NT AUTHORITY\local service
NT AUTHORITY\system
SHAREPOINT\system
4. After the query returns no results (accept the system accounts) start a full crawl.
Notes:
1. As for stage 2, you better test 2-3 users just to make sure that after you give them permissions to the root site they are infect removed from the query search results.
2. By give permission I mean any type of permission, “read” is enough. While giving permissions to a user in the root level the SID is updated and fixed (somehow…).
3. I had a local problem with some of the users which appeared in the returned result – I couldn’t add them to the site collection because they were deleted from the Active Directory (former employees) so simply had to delete them through the “People and Groups” of the site collection.