Of note other guides to doing Indexing across other servers have stated you had to be in a domain with domain users, this is not true. We have this working now in a non-domain setup. You just have to create the exact same user with the same password on the location the files are stored and the Indexing/MS-SQL server.

Thanks for that Leith. Didn't know about the domain/user thing. It's weird how MS authentication works sometimes.

Ok, these steps as well fixed the issues with our very last production system.

I'm now having issues with certain installs not having their Windows Indexing Services not indexing PDF files. Are there any good resources on debugging those issues?

[quote]
Posted By Leith Tussing on 02 May 2011 17:25:08
Ok, more digging and digging and help from Peter I think we've finally resolved the issues with the remote MS-SQL Server and Windows Indexing Service working reliably. Using the following additional steps we were able to get DMX reliably returning data from the remote Index on 3 development websites and our 2 production websites.

* You must be running DMX 5.3.x at a minimum since it adds the remote folder path to the Index settings section

* Your remote file location must have a network share and not a full UNC file path (\\Server\DMX$ and not \\Server\e$\DNN\Portals\0\...) The Indexing Service has no issues with this but we found this stopped DMX/DNN from working correctly when passing the data to the MS-SQL server to limit returns.

* We found that even with these values correctly set and the other guides followed some installs would not return data. If this is the case we found running the following scripts fixed this. (This seemed to be an issue on portals that had DMX uninstalled at some point previously.)
- Prepare Portal
- Repair Permissions
- Repair Structure
- Reindex Installation
[/quote]

I resolved indexing PDF's over the network as well by granting "Authenticated Users" Read permission to the Share & folder ACLs. The issue with indexing PDFs over a network share is that the PDF IFilter is loaded as the Indexing Service's user account and not the mapped network account in the index directories location.