Fast Search for SharePoint 2010: Crawl running but not crawling content

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This is an oldie but goodie in the sense that I just resolved this yesterday but my customer is still on SharePoint 2010 and FAST Search 2010. They are nostalgic what can I say

Symptoms were that the crawl would run for hours but nothing was logged in the crawl log

Problem #1

I looked at the Event log of the SharePoint Server running search 14 and saw '' Failed to connect to xxx:13391 Failed to initialize session with document engine: Unable to resolve Contentdistributor'   This is indicative of the certificate expiring.

Resolution Problem #1: Certificate expired

Since this was a 2 node farm, 1 sharepoint server, 1 FAST Search server we did the following:

  1. Generate a new certificate (per these instructions here)
    1. Stop FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint on all servers in the farm, including the monitoring service.
    2. On the FAST Search administration server:
      1. On the Start menu, click All Programs.
      2. Click Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint.
      3. Right-click SharePoint 2010 Management Shell, and select Run as administrator.
      4. At the command prompt, browse to installer\scripts under the installation folder.
      5. Type the following command: .\ReplaceDefaultCertificate.ps1 -generateNewCertificate $true
      6. Enter a password for the certificate.
    3. Start FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint on the administration server.
  2. Copy it over to the SharePoint server running FAST Search connector
    1. Copy the script SecureFASTSearchConnector.ps1 from the FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint administration server to the SharePoint Server 2010 server that is running the FAST Search connector. The SecureFASTSearchConnector.ps1 script can be found in the installation folder, under \installer\scripts\ .
    2. On the SharePoint Server 2010 server that is running the FAST Search connector, follow these steps:
      1. On the Start menu, click All Programs.
      2. Click Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products.
      3. Right-click SharePoint 2010 Management Shell, and select Run as administrator.
      4. Browse to the directory where you copied the SecureFASTSearchConnector.ps1 script and run it, replacing the necessary parameters with the values for your environment. The domain and user name should reflect the details of the user running the SharePoint Server Search 14 service (OSearch14):
        • .\SecureFASTSearchConnector.ps1 -ssaName "name of your content SSA" -username "domain\username"
      • When prompted enter the name of the certificate password that you entered when you first ran the post-setup of FAST Search server for SharePoint 2010

In a properly configured environment the SharePoint Search service will restart and you'll be good to go, in my case we came across this new error: Connection to contentdistributor {server name: 13390 } could not be validated. Check your certificates and ssa configuration and make sure that the instance of FAST search server backend is running.

I've highlighted that port number because that was the clue as to what the next problem was

Problem #2: incorrectly configured to use port 13390

According to this KB article: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2619798 the FAST Search content distributors need to use 13391 as stated in the install_info.txt.

  1. Go to Central admin>>FAST Search Connector>>Properties in the Ribbon. Find the 'Content Distributors' towards the bottom and change the port number from 13391 to 13390
  2. In this case I also discovered that they had the wrong port configured in their install_info.txt file. So we changed it to 13391k, then saved the file:

­

FAST Search Content Search Service Application configuration   ---------------------------------------------------------------   Content Distributors (for PowerShell SSA creation):   servername:13391   Content Distributors (for GUI SSA creation):         servername:13391   Default Content Collection Name:                     sp
  1. We restarted the FAST Search service along with the SP Search service for good measure
  2. It took a good 15 minutes for the changes to propagate, we then ran a full crawl and saw that the crawl log was populating. Problems #2 resolved.

Recommendation is to place a meeting on your calendar a week or two before your certificate is set to expire. That way this issue will not catch you by surprise