SharePoint Fun

I’ve been doing a fair bit of FAST search configuration and re-configuration lately, and I just wanted to point out a few things that are good to know and understand.

Let’s start with some basics. If you use the following guide for configuring FAST (and I usually do) http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff381243.aspx, then you should be aware of:

• You configure two service applications for FAST: FAST Content and FAST Query SSA. FAST Content is a FAST Search Connector. FAST Query SSA is FAST Search Query.
• The FAST Content service application is where you configure your Content Sources and crawl MOST content. Please note that I say MOST and not ALL. Your user profiles or ‘People’ search, are crawled using the FAST Query SSA.
  
  Please reference this article for details: http://sptechland.wordpress.com/2010/10/08/fast-people-and-content-search/. This is a key thing to understand, because until you initiate a crawl for the Local SharePoint sites Content Source in the FAST Query SSA, you won’t see any people results in the People scope.
• If you’re trying to figure out HOW to crawl your user profiles, make sure that the following url is added to your FAST Query SSA – Local SharePoint sites Content Source: sps3://serverurl.

Some other things I’ve noticed:

• My scopes in the FAST Query SSA service application don’t accurately display the number of items in each scope. I haven’t gotten to the bottom of this yet.
• My Content Distributor port as recorded in the Install_Info.txt was not accurate. Read more here: http://blog.qumsieh.ca/2011/08/02/error-unable-to-resolve-contentdistributor/
• There is a neat codeplex tool for querying your FAST farm to test search results. http://fastforsharepoint.codeplex.com/

And finally, if you come across this error:

The search service is not able to connect to the machine that hosts the administration component. Verify that the administration component ’43fa5edd-3e14-4dba-b54c-7aad045dfdf7′ in search application ‘FASTContent’ is in a good state and try again.

Run the following command:

stsadm -o provisionservice -action start -servicename osearch14 -servicetype "Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchService, Microsoft.Office.Server.Search, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c"