Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

602 Part VII: Information Management in SharePoint Products and Technologies
Before beginning an update, the content index is in the “initializing” state. If
there are a large number of alerts or people profiles, the content index can stay in
the “initializing” state for a period of time.
Note If power to the server is interrupted during an update, the update
continues after power is restored. For a full update, the crawl restores the
previous checkpoint and then resumes. For an incremental update, the
crawl restores the previous checkpoint and then redoes all work that
occurred after the previous checkpoint. The content index is still available
for queries during this time.
Updates and Permissions
All updates pick up permission changes. Access control lists are indexed as part of
a document’s properties. However, only the full update picks up changes to membership
in local groups. Because of this, you should not use local groups to secure
content that SharePoint Portal Server crawls.
The Gatherer Log
Each time SharePoint Portal Server 2003 creates or updates a content index, it also
creates a gatherer log. The gatherer log is located in a table in the component settings
database for the portal site and can be viewed by selecting links on the Site
Settings—Configure Search And Indexing page of a portal. This log contains data
about URLs accessed by SharePoint Portal Server while it is creating an index. An
administrator can also configure the log to record successful accesses, indexing
warnings, access errors, and accesses disallowed by rules, which it does not log by
default.
Viewing Gatherer Logs
The latest gatherer log can be viewed on the SharePoint Portal Server Central
Administration page, but only if the administrator has enabled advanced search
administration mode. This view of the gatherer log includes summary or detailed
information as well as customized views of the log.
By default, the gatherer log shows only the information from the last crawl.
When a new crawl begins, the log entries from the new crawl can overwrite previously
recorded entries. However, the gatherer log does not overwrite entries that are
less than five days old. Log entries over five days old are considered to be obsolete.
If no crawl is performed for more than five days, the log remains unchanged until a
new crawl begins. Then all entries are deleted.