bypass load balancing server when crawling through a single content source

Question

we have 2 crawl servers in the farm which is used to crawl all the content sources in the farm.For one of the content sources(this content source is an external repository) we want just the one server to be used for crawling. Is there a way that we can bypass a load balancing server when crawling through a single content source?

Answer 1

We cannot target a crawl server to a particular content source.

Answer 2

Given the Content Source is for a particular FQDN that is not in another Content Source (e.g. an sps3 crawl versus a crawl of the same MySites FQDN), you can either use a hosts file on the crawler to redirect as needed, or use the SiteDataServer property if the Content Source target is a Web Application.