Indexing fails and I don't know why!

My goal is to replace the current search that is on our website (not working properly) with sphider. I've installed it and can access the admin pages. After entering URL's, and I try to index the site, I am getting 'http 403 unreachable' and 'http 404 unreachable' errors. I've been searching for 2 days to figure out why this is happening and how to correct it. I give up. Can anyone tell me what needs to be done to allow me to successfully index the site?

The site has never been a problem to access via browser. I have looked for a log file to help determine what is or is not happening and there doesn't appear to be one. This type of error makes me suspect that it could be a permission problem, but I'm not sure what the permissions need to be.

I am also a little confused by the categories. Do these correspond to subdirectories within the site?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you!

The problem turned out to be the hosts file. Somehow the IP address was wrong in this file. Once that was fixed, it runs.

I'm still confused by the categories tho. How are they to be used?
Thanks!

Hello di33,

Categories do indeed look confusing in the beginning. Try looking in these threads, they should help: [www.sphider.eu] and [www.sphider.eu].

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MyBrute - settle your differences in the Arena!

Sphider was working for me in 2009 and 2010 but when I come to index now I get "unreachable" whatever I use as the domain.
Even when I try mydomain/index.htm where the Spider folder is in the same folder as the index file.
So I was wondering what you meant by "the hosts file". I don't find such a file so don't see what to fix.
Can you remember?