itaysk

After applying SP2 on a MOSS farm, search indexing stopped working. We were getting errors like:
”The object was not found. (The item was deleted because it was either not found or the crawler was denied access to it.)”

Googling the error, we found out that the problem is not appearing if you have a site collection in the root path of our web application (in example http://myserver/ ). Actually, I have blogged about this issue before, regarding a different problem. It seems that SharePoint has some issues if you don't have a site collection at the root path.

Anyway, our problem was that we couldn't create a site collection at the root path. this is because we had the root path set to wildcard inclusion. our main site collection was at http://myserver/portal where "portal" is not a managed path, but the site collection name. because the root managed path is set to wildcard inclusion, we can't create a site collection at the explicit root path -  http://myserver/ .

eventually I have found a workaround:

1. I have created a new managed path: http://myserver/portal. and made it explicit.

2. I have removed the old root managed path.

3. I have recreated the root managed path with explicit character.

At this point I had my site collection working by the explicit managed path http://myserver/portal instead of the wildcard managed path http://myserver/.

Now I could create a site collection at the root managed path as usual, and still keep my site collection at it's original address.