Windows SharePoint Services Search – No Results and Errors

I had a client who has WSS.  They weren’t seeing any search results.  There were also some errors being logged on the server the most prevalent of which was:

Event Type:        Warning
Event Source:    Windows SharePoint Services 3 Search
Event Category:                Gatherer
Event ID:              2436
Date:                     11/5/2007
Time:                     10:00:03 AM
User:                     N/A
Computer:          SERVER
Description:
The start address <sts3://server/contentdbid={70792d37-74fc-430d-8939-d55afebdb795}> cannot be crawled.

Context: Application ‘Search index file on the search server’, Catalog ‘Search’

Details:
The object was not found.   (0x80041201)

The reason for the error … the server couldn’t reach the web application on its default URL.  Once I changed the alternate access mappings so that the default URL was reachable from the server and issued a command to start a full search (see below), it finally indexed things correctly.  The command to force a full crawl is:

STSADM –o spsearch –action fullcrawlstart