Search crawler reports access denied, even though default content access account has rights via policy
I had a single server moss setup on a windows 2008 virtualised box, and it was crawling fine. I don't do much search, it was until when I wanted to install iFilter for pdf from FoxIt, I realised the crawler is hitting access denied error. Application log as captured warnings from Office Server Search, while nothing in is captured in the Security logs.
Did a search, and found that it got to do with loopback check, which prevents the crawler from authentication as the fqdn doesn't match the machine name. You can either disable loopback check all together, or specify the fqdn which can be accessed.
More info in this kb.