Issue on SharePoint 2010 Crawling Schedule

This post will show a way to solve a problem related to SharePoint 2010 Crawl Schedule. This problem is a real-life scenario that was encountered in the field and the steps of analysis and troubleshoot will be described.

Scenario

I found a problem when I tried to create a full schedule on the default SharePoint  Content Source. To reach this problem I followed these steps:

1 - Open SharePoint 2010 Central Administration

2 - Click “Manage Service Applications” at “Application Management” group

3 - In the list of Service Applications, select your Search Service and at Ribbon choose “Manage” .

4 - To create crawl schedule, click “Content Sources”

5 - Click at the name of your contente source (In my case Local SharePoint sites)

6 – At this screen you can schedule your incremental and full crawls clicking “Create Schedule”

7 - After schedule configured, click “OK” to close this pop-up window

8 - At “Edit Content Source” screen, when you click “OK”, to commit changes, the screen refreshes and nothing happens.

Troubleshoot

To analyze and diagnose this issue, the above scenario was made several times to generate multiple occurrences in Logs and facilitate analysis.
The first approach was analyze web requests. Through Fiddler, all the requests of Web protocols was analysed during the test described in the scenario. But this analysis was not sufficient to diagnose the problem. The next step was to analyze IIS Logs, ULS and Event Viewer.
At this analysis were found many access permission errors (ACCESS DENIED). However in all sources of information, the location and access denied user were not specified. Looking at GPO result, it was possible to discover that the permissions of the Tasks folder was changed.

Solution

In this case, this problem occurs because a Group Policy was applied and changed the permissions at Task folder (%windir%\Tasks). SharePoint uses this folder to store information about crawl schedule and the following permissions are necessary:

So, it’s important to maintain the groups WSS_ADMIN_WPG and WSS_WPG with Full Control permissions at this folder.

Follow these steps to change the permissions:

1. Open Command Prompt
2. Type the command attrib –s %windir%\tasks
3. Open the folder %windir%\Tasks in Windows Explorer
4. Inside the folder, right-click and select Security tab
5. Grant to the WSS_WPG and WSS_ADMIN_WPG the Full Control permission
6. Restart IIS using the command IISRESET \NOFORCE inside Command Prompt
7. Type the command attrib +s %windir%\tasks

Now you can try creating the crawl schedules again and everything should works fine!