2436 Error - With a twist :)

Well recently the server started recieving 2436 errors. After spending a whole day googling and trying numerous suggestions, tearing my hair out, the next morning I almost instanty figured out what the problem was However I still haven't found a solution, hopefully some guru's out there can help... Explanation below:

Setup: WSS 3.0, fully patched. Single server install.

I have two sites on our server, one internal over http: and one external using https: mapped to separate IP's.

The server at some point started giving pairs of 2436 errors, one for each site. I wont go into all the other 2436 suggested fixes, but they mostly focused on permissions and loopbacks not working. This problem ended up being permissions in a different way...

A few weeks ago we disabled integrated windows authentication on both sites because we are running novell logins instead of windows logins for all users (this will hopefully change soon, but thats the way it is ). By disabling integrated windows authentication, the service/content accounts which were manually keyed in and belong to the neccessary groups, ceased authenticating to the server! Turning integrated authentication back on fixed the problem, however we want to run with it OFF given our sad/unique environment. Has anyone run into this problem before

Any suggestions on how I can get these accounts authenticating to the server without having to have integrated authentication on

Are you talking about error in the crawl log

If yes, you cannot enable crawl with windows authentication turned off. You have to have at least one zone enabled with NTLM access, which will be used by the indexer to access the content. Once crawled, you can expose results to users logging in with other authentication modes.

The error was actually in the event log. This is definatly helpful though, not sure what to do in the interm though. people will have to just manually type the domain in to log on