Note: This article was originally published in 2013. Some steps, commands, or software versions may have changed. Check the current Sharepoint 2013 documentation for the latest information.

In this step-by-step guide, you’ll learn give sharepoint 2013 crawler sufficient rights/permissions to crawl file shares. SharePoint 2013 introduced social features, improved search, cross-site publishing, and enhanced mobile browsing experiences.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you have:

  • SharePoint Server 2013 or later
  • Farm administrator or site collection admin access
  • PowerShell with SharePoint snap-in

How to: Give (http://sharepoint.microsoft.com “Microsoft SharePoint”) 2013 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler “Web crawler”) sufficient rights/permissions to crawl file shares

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Consider the following scenario:

In this scenario, no search result is returned. Additionally, the following error message is generated in the crawl log:

The crawl account did not have sufficient privileges to access the security attributes of this file or folder. Ensure the crawl account has the ‘Manage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audit “Audit”) and security log’ privilege.

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To resolve this issue, assign the Manage Auditing And (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_log “Security log”) permission to the SharePoint 2013 crawler. To do this, follow these steps on the computer that hosts the file shares:

  1. Click Start , click Run , type gpedit.msc, and then click OK.
  2. Navigate to the following location in the Local Group Policy Editor:

Computer ConfigurationWindows SettingsSecurity SettingsLocal PoliciesUser Rights Assignment

  1. In the right pane, locate and (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_menu “Context menu”) Manage auditing and security log , and then click Properties.
  2. Click the Add User or Group button in the Manage auditing and security log properties (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialog_box “Dialog box”), and then add the crawl account that the SharePoint 2013 crawler uses.
  3. Click OK in the Manage auditing and security log properties dialog box.

Note If you assign the Manage Auditing And Security Log permission by using a (http://www.microsoft.com/grouppolicy “Group Policy”) (GPO), add the crawl account to the GPO.

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Summary

You’ve successfully learned give sharepoint 2013 crawler sufficient rights/permissions to crawl file shares. If you run into any issues, double-check the prerequisites and ensure your Sharepoint 2013 environment is properly configured.