An internal SharePoint Administrator of my customer has configured Alternate Access Mapping for an intranet portal. However, when creating a new web application, he entered the URL including SSL in the Host Header setting: https://sharepoint.contoso.com/. He then configured DNS and IIS binding to the IP Address of SharePoint server. In other words, there is no internal site so from a corporate network, I cannot access to SharePoint with an URL like http://sharepoint/.
The SharePoint Heath Analyzer tool alerts: "A default zone URL is pointing to the machine name of web front end. Since this installation has more than one web front ed, this can result in a variety or errors including incorrect links and failed operations"
Such an AAM configuration, I have found many error messages in Search service application.
- The server is unavailable and could not be accessed. The server probably disconnected from the network.
- The crawler could not communicate with the server. Check that the server is available and that the firewall access is configured correctly.
- The item could not be crawled because the repository did not respond within the specified timeout period.
- The item could not be accessed on the remote server because its address has an invalid syntax.
- The secure sockets layer (SSL) certificate sent by the server was invalid and this item will not be crawled.
I do think the misconfiguration of Alternate Access Mapping causes the Search errors, because Search cannot access to SharePoint site due to lacking of internal site.
What I would do is re-create a new web application and then move content databases to the new web application. After that, I will extend the web application to Extranet zone with specific Host Header (http://sharepoint.contoso.com). Finally, I should configure DNS and IIS binding.
Are there other ways to amend AAM without re-creating new web application? Your recommendations are appreciated.
Thanks,