I spent the best part of last week configuring FAST Search for SharePoint 2010, and along the way I came across an issue which at the time absolutely flummuxed me. On reflection I probably should have done a better job at diagnosing the issue, but time was tight and the pressure was on, so I called Microsoft Support and happily they did a great job of helping me to resolve the issue.

So, what was the issue?

Well I had to install a 2-server FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 Farm into which I had to plug a 12 server SharePoint 2010 Farm. Using the pretty comprehensive TechNet documentation I successfully configured the first Admin Node server, but when it came to adding in the second Non-Admin server the configuration repeatedly failed, and on analyzing the configuration log I kept seeing the message:

“27/07/2011 09:47:31 Verbose Utility.Execute – “{drive}:\FASTSearch\bin\MonitoringServiceConfig.exe” Output – Error: The file ‘{drive}:\FASTSearch\etc\middleware.cfg’ was not found.”

I consulted  the following resources on the Internet:

• TechNet article called Installation: Configuration wizard fails (FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint).
• Steve Peschka’s Blog Entry about configuration failures with FAST non-admin nodes.
• Corey Roth’s Blog Entry about the Configuration failure for a non-admin server.

Great though these resources are, none of them handled the specific error I was experiencing.  I had made sure of the following:

• The Firewall on both machines was on– odd but there you go, it is apparently safest to have the firewall’s on …
• I had created my deployment.xml in Notepad++ – not Visual Studio which puts in weird characters at the start of the file which FAST can’t deal with.
• Powershell scripts were enabled properly and that I was in the FastSearchAdministrators group on the servers in question.

My issue was eventually resolved after a support call with Microsoft and was simply down to a proxy configuration script.  FAST communicates between servers using IPSec it seems and any custom proxy configuration script can interfere.  So to resolve the issue I did the following:

• Opened up Internet Explorer.
• Selected Tools -> Internet Options -> Connections -> LAN Settings.
• Made sure that the “Use automatic configuration script” was unchecked and that the Address box was empty.
• Clicked OK and OK again.
• Re-ran the configuration wizard, this time is was successful.

My thanks to Microsoft Support.  Hope this helps anybody else who has the issue.

Cheers

Dave Mc