Crawling wss3 site from SP2010 standard using STS3 url

Question

I'm bringing up a SP 2010 standard instance and want to configure it to crawl the old WSS3 site collection until the migration is done. I understand that the proper method is to use the STS3 urls rather than http. If I configure http://oldsite.example.com as a source, it works correctly. If I configure sts3://oldsite.example.com I get the message:

"The start address sts3://oldsite.example.com/ cannot be added when crawling the entire web application. Either select to crawl only the SharePoint site, or provide a hostname only start address to crawl."

which is probably the worst error description I have ever read.

What should my search urls look like?

Answer 1

This error message means that it doesn't recognise the URI as a web application hostname. You can change the crawl settings to "Only crawl the Site Collection of each start address" and see if that works, but I don't think it will find all your site collections and is probably not what you want. I suggest you use the http: protocol, which it obviously is correctly accepting as the hostname for your WSS web application.

Answer 2

If you select SharePoint Site as contentsource, the following protocols are supported: http https sps3 sps3s Checked in the SharePointContentSource class in the Microsoft.Office.Server Assembly

Answer 3

I never had luck with sts3 early on, with 2010 we just use the http URL of our site for the crawls and have never had issues.