SharePoint 2010 cannot crawl PDF files
Background
- Environment: Windows 2008 SP2, SharePoint 2010 October CU, SQL Server 2008 SP2
- PDF files were hosted within SharePoint
- Adobe PDF ifilter were installed correctly
Requirement
SharePoint search should be able to search within PDF content
Issue
After numerous checks and cross checked (by multiple people), Search was just not be able to crawl PDF content.
Regarding installing Adobe PDF iFilter, there are multiple documentation on the internet, but I was primarily going off https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2293357
Weird thing was everything was working per documentation in development (single) server environment, but just would not work in QA (multi) server environment.
After painstaking review of ULS (with verbose turned on for SharePoint Search), ULS had listed below entry
05/15/2012
12:58:50.58 mssdmn.exe (0x13C0) 0x063C SharePoint Server Search Exceptions 1hjo Medium Exception thrown: 0x80070005 (d:\office\source\search\native\ytrip\tripoli\filtereg\filtreghelper.cxx:788 ip 0x000007FEE19E2D59)
Above error was detected everytime an attempt was made to request PDF file.
For e.g.
CHttpAccessorHelper::InitRequestInternal - successful request for 'https://servername/Shared%20Documents/PDF%20Search%20Text%20Sample.pdf'. [httpacchelper.cxx:613] d:\office\source\search\native\gather\protocols\http\httpacchelper.cxx
Resolution
Exception 0x80070005 is related to Access denied, hence this pointed to the fact that service account running SharePoint Search (for e.g. Domain\svc_SPS_Search) did not have access to PDF Filter file used by Adobe.
In dev env, it worked as everything was running under farm account).
After giving appropriate READ permissions to Adobe Filter binary folder (and restarting Search service), we were able to crawl PDF files hosted within SharePoint
Note: This issue may also occur for FoxIT on multi server environment (with Search service account being different from farm account).