MOSS Search crawler not populating out of the box or custom metadata properties

One interesting issue we faced on my current ongoing project was that MOSS Search crawler would not popluate the out of the box or custom metadata properties, it would return results as if it was a HTTP crawl. This was only an issue on 1 farm, unfortunately this was the production farm, the UAT environment was working as expected.

After a colleague of mine searched the interent endlessly, finding others with the same issue but no answers, we logged a call with Microsoft and got a guy on live meeting who solved the issue in about 5 minutes.

When SharePoint creates the IIS Web Application it should place a HTTP Response Header called MicrosoftSharePointTeamServices with a version number as shown below:

In our case in production for whatever reason it did not create this header.

Adding the header manually got use up and running!