Microsoft FAST Search Administration – Unexpected error occurred while communicating with Administration Service
SharePoint Application Pool Account Permissions on FAST Admin Servers
The Central Admin site application pool account requires permission to connect to the FAST admin web service on your FAST admin server. To resolve this:
- On your FAST admin server, check that you have a local security group “FASTSearchAdministrators”
- Add the active directory account for your central admin app pool to the local security group on your FAST admin server “FASTSearchAdministrators”
FAST Service Account Permissions on FAST Service Applications in SharePoint
The Central Admin service applications may require permissions to be allocated to the app pool accounts.
- Open Central Admin website
- In Application Management, Service Applications, select Manage Service Applications
- Hilight your FAST Search Connector service application and click the “Permissions” button
- Check that the FAST service account has “Full Control” permissions assigned
- Click “OK”
SharePoint Certificate Installed on FAST
Follow the instructions in Enable queries from Microsoft SharePoint Server (FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint) to ensure the SharePoint certificate used to communicate is trusted by the FAST admin web service. Note that it states “Configure claims authentication”, but I have had to do this on claims-based sharepoint sites as well as “classic” windows authenticated sites. Thus I believe this is a necessary step to remove this error.
FAST Certificate Installed on SharePoint
On installation, FAST creates a PFX certificate that is used to secure communication between the SharePoint server and the FAST Admin server. To install this certificate on your SharePoint server(s):
- Copy the script securefastsearchconnector.ps1 from the FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint server to the SharePoint 2010 Server. The securefastsearchconnector.ps1 script is in the installation folder, under installer\scripts\
- Copy the certificate file FASTSearchCert.pfx from the FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint admin server to the SharePoint 2010 Server. The certificate file is in the installation folder, under data\data_security\cert\
- Open a Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administration Shell with the Run as administrator option on the SharePoint 2010 Server. Navigate 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 username should reflect the details of the user running the SharePoint Server Search 14 (OSearch14) service.
.\SecureFASTSearchConnector.ps1 -certPath "path of the certificate\certificatename.pfx" -ssaName "name of your content SSA" -username "domain\username"
When prompted to enter the certificate password, enter the certificate password that you supplied when you ran the post-setup configuration of FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint.
