I encountered this strangest thing and I'm not sure it's a bug or a feature... I suspect it to be the first option.
First the situation: To live up to DNS conventions within a company, a systems administrator wants MOSS 2007 to be published to the intranet in a following manner:
http://SERVERNAME/SharePoint
So, these will be all the sites:
Root: http://SERVERNAME/SharePoint
Sites: http://SERVERNAME/SharePoint/Sites/<site collection name>
Mysites: http://SERVERNAME/SharePoint/Personal/<username>
This is actually easily to accomplish. You just have to add some Managed Paths (In Central Administration > Application Management) for "SharePoint" (Explicit Inclusion), SharePoint/Sites (Wildcard Inclusion) and SharePoint/Personal (Wildcard Inclusion). And you have to make sure, when you create a Shared Services Provider, you point at the correct locations.
But then, the problem popped up. When I tried to crawl my content, I received following error:
sps3://SERVERNAME
Error in PortalCrawl Web Service
So people aren't crawled.
After lot's of searching, this came up:
If I create an "root" site collection, so in http://SERVERNAME, the error disappears and people is crawled again.
If I then delete that site collection again, the error reappears and I'm back at point one.
So I'm afraid a "root" site is required for the people crawl to work.
If anyone knows anything more about this, please contact me... I'm dying to know
Keep on dancing
Tom