Full crawl only finding root page of new site collection

Had an interesting experience when testing a new server farm environment. We created a new web application/site collection for an intranet site. It uses 2 network load balanced WFEs, two query servers and a seperate index server, which uses itself as the WFE for crawling.

The site appeared to work fine, users could access it no problem. We added a test document and ran a full crawl of the site, which revealed no errors. Searching for the document didn't work.

There are several things that can cause this, not least that if you use the document centre to store your test doc you have to remember to publish it first ;)

In this case that didn't work. Remembering that we had just set up the site, and that we picked "restart IIS manually", i realised that we had not run reset on the index server, which is its own WFE for crawling. Running iisreset didn't work, and closer inspection revealed that IIS did not contain our new site. This is not supposed to be possible, as the MOSS farm should push changes to all servers automatically. We checked the timer service and it was running, but looking in the event log turned up the sharepoint errors with event id 6398, 6482, 7076.

After a bit of googling it turns out that there is a bug in .NET2 ASDI for IIS, meaning that owstimer throws errors when trying to provision sites on those servers.

Fortunately there is now a hotfix available http://support.microsoft.com/?id=946517, and after the restart of the servers