SharePoint 2010 - The start address cannot be crawled

I'm a bit stuck trying to sort crawling issues on a brand new three-tier SP2010 farm.

 

 

I do not know whether the problem is related to SharePoint configuration or to the F5 load balancer in front of the farm.

 

 

On the load balancer, we've created a rule to redirect all traffic to https://site.domain.com to the SP2007 farm and all the traffic to https://site.domain.com/sites/awebsite to the SP2010 farm. This is working fine.

 

 

I'm trying to get https://site.domain.com/sites/awebsite crawled, but each time I start a full crawl I get this event in the event viewer

 

 

Log Name: Application

 

Source: Microsoft-SharePoint Products-SharePoint Server Search

 

Date: 9/8/2011 9:32:12 PM

 

Event ID: 14

 

Task Category: Gatherer

 

Level: Warning

 

Keywords:

 

User: DOMAIN\sp_farm

 

Computer: SERVER.domain.corp

 

Description:

 

The start address https://site.domain.com/sites/awebsite cannot be crawled.

 

 

Context: Application 'Search_Service_Application', Catalog 'Portal_Content'

 

 

Details:

 

This item could not be crawled because the repository did not respond within the specified timeout period. Try to crawl the repository at a later time, or increase the timeout value on the Proxy and Timeout page in search administration. You might also want to crawl this repository during off-peak usage times. (0x80040d7b)

 

 

 

 

 

In the ULS logs I can see this other error message

 

 

The start address https://site.domain.com/sites/awebsite cannot be crawled. Context: Application 'Search_Service_Application', Catalog 'Portal_Content' Details: Access is denied. Verify that either the Default Content Access Account has access to this repository, or add a crawl rule to crawl this repository. If the repository being crawled is a SharePoint repository, verify that the account you are using has "Full Read" permissions on the SharePoint Web Application being crawled. (0x80041205)

 

 

 

I do not have a huge experience with SP2010, so any help is welcome.

 

 

The irule defined on the F5 is the following

 

when HTTP_REQUEST {

 

if { [HTTP::uri] starts_with "/sites/awebsite" } {

 

log local0. "Client IP: [IP::client_addr] for [HTTP::uri] forwarded traffic to sharepoint 2010"

 

SSL::disable serverside

 

pool sharepoint_int_2010_pool

 

}

 

switch -glob [HTTP::header "Referer"] {

 

"https://site.domain.com/sites/awebsite*" {

 

log local0. "Header: [HTTP::header "Referer"] for [HTTP::uri]"

 

SSL::disable serverside

 

pool sharepoint_int_2010_pool

 

}

 

}

 

}

 

 

 

Thanks in advance