DisableLoopbackCheck on Windows Server 2008

Recently I was troubleshooting a SharePoint farm of a customer. The crawl of the content sources did not work and always ended with a “access denied” error in the crawl log. In the eventlog event ID 2436 appeared: “Access is denied. Check that the Default Content Access Account has access to this content, or add a crawl rule to crawl this content.”

To solve this you have to make a DisableLoopbackCheck registry key. Follow these steps to do so:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa
3. Right-click Lsa, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4. Type DisableLoopbackCheck, and then press ENTER.
5. Right-click DisableLoopbackCheck, and then click Modify.
6. In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.
7. Quit Registry Editor, and then restart your computer.

Tags: Best Practices, error