Access denied, HTTP 401 error crawling a SharePoint site on another farm

I had two SharePoint 2010 farms (both on the same domain), one running Enterprise Edition and the other SharePoint Foundation. When trying to crawl a site on the Foundation farm from the Enterprise farm all I got was a single error in the crawl log along the lines of ‘Access denied’ and ‘HTTP 401 Unauthorized’.

I confirmed that the content access account had all the rights it needed to crawl the site, so that wasn’t the problem.

It turned out to be related to the entry for the site’s host header in the hosts file on the Foundation server. It had been added using the local host IP of 127.0.0.1.   Changing it to use the actual IP address of the server sorted things out and the Enterprise server was able to crawl the site on the Foundation server successfully.

Ian Docking – Senior Technical Consultant