Access is denied. Check that the Default Content Access Account has access to this content, or add a crawl rule to crawl this content.

After Adding a new index server to the farm - made that a dedicated indexer-

after that when I tried a full crawl the crawl stopped immediately and the following error is recorded to crawl log:

Access is denied. Check that the Default Content Access Account has access to this content, or add a crawl rule to crawl this content.

also, on the indexer windows event log there was this warnings:

event id :2436  The start address cannot be crawled. Context: Application 'SharedServices1', Catalog 'Portal_Content'  Details:   Access is denied. Check that the Default Content Access Account has access to this content, or add a crawl rule to crawl this content.   (0x80041205)

So I googled and find this brilliant forum topic on msdn

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointsearch/thread/52877c8f-ac38-4cd3-813e-87f8f7a6882f

Applied the solution and it worked like a charm.

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.

Can be seen on the screenshot..

Search results differ from computer to computer in Sharepoint

I encountered a very strange problem in SharePoint last week. The search was working okay in every web application but one.

the indexing process was working all right, the method,  crawler had no errors.

I tried over and over every way I know to make it work. The strange thing was the advanced search was able to return results if you select the file name as a managed property.

I suspected that the problem could be Internet explorer but after getting the same "no results were found" screen with google chrome I stopped suspecting from IE.

It then hit me, that I was able to run the search without problems on the server. At first I thought it was a permission problem and the users were not permitted to see the search results. but nope!

I was able to return search results on the server with my username so I came up to realize that the search results were differing / varying from computer to computer. The first thing I suspected was internet explorer..again!!

and I finally found this brilliant blog post which rescued me from this rumble!
http://excel.shilor.org/2010/03/inconsistent-moss-search-results-in.html

and here is my technet forum post which did not really helped at all :)

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sharepointsearch/thread/eef860e8-5eb1-4498-9495-cd0c09e39913