R – MOSS Search Content Crawl Account Permissions

One thing to remember is that crawling SharePoint sites is different from crawling file shares or non-SharePoint websites.

A few other quick pointers:

• the sps3: protocol is for crawling user profiles for People Search. You can disregard anything the crawler says about it until you're ready for user profiles.
• your crawl account is supposed to have access to your entire farm. If you see permissions errors, find the KB article that tells you the how to reset your crawl account (it's a specific stsadm.exe command). If you're trying to crawl another farm's content, then you'll have to work something else out to grant your crawl account access. I think this is your biggest issue presently.
• The crawler (running from the index server) will attempt to visit the public URL. I've had inter-server communication issues before; make sure all three servers can ping each other, and make sure the index server can reach the public URL (open IE on the index server and check it out). If you have problems, it's time to dirty up your index server's hosts file. This is something SharePoint does for you anyway, so don't feel too bad doing it. If you've set up anything aside from Integrated Windows Authentication, you'll have to work harder to get your crawler working.

Anyway, there's been a lot of back and forth in the responses, so I'm just shotgunning a bunch of suggestions out there, maybe one of them is on target.

No, the only option is to remove the roles in the Manifest.xml file of the content export. If you received the export as a single file, just rename it to .CAB and extract the Manifest.xml file for modification. The XML format is pretty extensive and it might take you some studying to figure out where the roles are. Microsoft has documented the XML schema here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb249989.aspx