Troubleshooting issues with SharePoint crawling Forms based Authenticated sites.

Extracted from the original post

What this 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?

Requirements:

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

A forms based authentication enabled site (NOTE: This could be a SharePoint based FBA site too)

We start by downloading addrule.exe to the SharePoint server. This tool is available at SharePoint Server 2007 Tool: Add/Edit Crawl Rules with Form/Cookie Credentials.

We then create a XML file to feed the addrule.exe. The specification of the XML file is documented in Searching Sites Protected by Forms Authentication with Enterprise Search in SharePoint Server 2007 and even in SharePoint Server 2007 Tool: Add/Edit Crawl Rules with Form/Cookie Credentials.

I get this Sample XML file created.

http://fbasite/*
FORMS
http://fbasite/_layouts/login.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2f
POST

administrator
mypassword!
Sign In

I then create a content source that points to the http://fbasite URL.

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