After re-creating portals and re-installing the SharePoint components multiple times I finally decided to add the SharePoint user to the Web and Search and the indexing and Job servers Administrators group. Only then did the portal connect to the indexing server. What I find odd is the instructions for “Deploying a Medium server Farm” from the “Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Administrators Guide” are as follows:
Perform all pre-setup server farm preparations
Note Ensure that you use the same domain account (in the form DOMAIN\domain_account) wherever you see domain account in the server farm instructions. Do not use different accounts for each instance of the domain account.
The domain account that you are adding here is used as the configuration database administration account. This account is used later in the installation section.
Log on to each server as a local or domain administrator.
Add a domain account to the local Power Users group on each computer in the server farm, except on the computer running SQL Server.
Note You must add the domain account to the local Administrators group on any server that hosts the components for backward-compatible document libraries.
On the computer running SQL Server, do the following:
Configure the MSSQLSERVER service to start automatically, and then confirm that the service starts successfully at startup.
Configure the domain account that you added to the server farm computers to have the Security Administrators and Database Creators server roles on this SQL Server instance.
It only indicates to add the user to the local Administrators group if you are running the backward-compatible document libraries which I am not.
Anyone know why we need such elevated privileges?