can we extend FBA authentication to Windows authentication to enable CRAWL!!

Question

Hi I have a problem, our sharepoint 2010 has a FBA authenticated site with Default zone and crawl fails because it cannot access the FBA site.

Now requirement is crawl is must to have and we dont have windows autheticated zone. I have read on internet that we can extend the FBA site to

custom zone with windows auth and crawl can access the site and search works?

even if crawl can search, can users able to able to query search from FBA Site and results will link to FBA site not windows site??

please help!!!

Answer 1

Hi Sullar,

Yes, you can crawl FBA protected sites. However, it will require a little bit of extra work. The following blog describes is the steps you need to get SharePoint to crawl a Forms based Authentication site. What are the issues you may face and how to resolve them. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/spses/archive/2011/11/10/troubleshooting-issues-with-sharepoint-crawling-forms-based-authenticated-sites.aspx 

However, I am assuming that since you posted the question in the SharePPoint 2010 Forums you mean how to crawl claims based autrhenticated site?

1. Extend web app to an NTLM auth site. (If you’ve already extended your web app to NTLM, skip to Step 2 below.)

As you probably already know, SharePoint 2010 cannot crawl claims-based web applications directly. So the first thing to do is to extend https://YourWebApp.com application to another IIS site which uses only NTLM authentication.

Go to Central Administration > Application Management > Manage web applications> Select your web application > click on Extend button in the ribbon. Fill out the “Extend web application” form and make sure that for Claims Authentication Types you only select “Enable Windows Authentication” and check “Integrated Windows Authentication” NTLM checkbox.

All other fields can be left with their default values. Make sure to take note of the Public URL, it will look something like this: http://YourWebApp.com:88/

2. Modify Search Service content sources to crawl the NTLM site. In Central Admin, open Application Management > Manage service applications > click on your Search Service application. Click on Content Sources and edit your content source to crawl the NTLM site you just created (http://YourWebApp.com:88).

3. Add Server mapping, within your Search Service Application, click on “Server Name Mappings” and creating a mapping between your NTLM site and the public URL.

Address in index: http://YourWebApp.com:88; Address in search results: https://YourWebApp.com

Note: Some blog posts online will skip the server name mapping step and instead tell you to change your Default Alternate Access Mapping to point to http://YourWebApp.com:88. While it will work most of the time, there are times when it will not work properly.

4. Indexing, In your Search Service Application, reset the index and perform a full crawl. Review the crawl log and make sure that there are no top level errors and you shhould be good to go.

-Ivan

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Ivan Sanders My LinkedIn Profile, My Blog, @iasanders.

Answer 2

Thanks that was spot on. except did not knew it would IISRESET the whole server for extending a single app. Thanks anyway for quick response...:)