Having a bit of a SharePoint day. Had recently noticed that no People were being returned in search results, even if you type in their name exactly.
Went through the check list of possible causes:
- Default Content Access account permissions to the User Profile Service (Read Profiles for Search Crawler)
- Full Read permissions on the My Site Web Application
- Crawl Rule set up for the My Site Web Application
- Location included in the Content Source
We were still getting Access Denied errors.
Suddenly remembered this little MS article about accessing FQDN’s from the local machine. Turns out it is still relevant in SharePoint 2010.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861
Hope this helps someone else out there with the mysterious Access Denied when crawling Profiles.