In one of my recent FAST implementations to a large Government Organization in Western Australia, I faced numerous interesting issues and would like to share them with the SharePoint communitiy in my next few articles.
In my view point, even though FAST is a very powerful and useful component when it comes to integration with SharePoint it need some major improvements, fixes and specially better error handling.
Issue 1: “Post Configuration of FAST failed”
Error/Exception in FAST install Logs:
Utility.WriteException – Exception - : Exception – Microsoft.SharePoint.Search.Extended.Installer.Mahasen.Common.Utility.ExecutorException: Command returned non-zero at Microsoft.SharePoint.Search.Extended.Installer.Mahasen.Common.Utility.Executor.CheckReturnCode(Int32 returnCode)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Search.Extended.Installer.Mahasen.Common.Utility.Executor.ExecuteCommand(String command, String arguments, String workingDirectory, Int32 timeout, ILogWriter logWriter)
FAST farm Post Configuration failed with the above error message which is very generic and makes no sense, which forced us to reflect some dlls to find out the root cause of the issue.
The reason for the above error was the failure of the command ”d:\fastsearch\bin\msdtcsetup -admin”.
Again we dont have any clue of what prevents msdtcsetup from running therefore next we used NetMon (MS Network monitor tool) to analyse and further trouble shoot the network traffic. Netmon was very useful in finding out the exact root cause which was MSDC service permission was limited to Local Admin, LOCAL and INTERACTIVE by a group policy.
Since we found out the extract root cause the resolution was pretty simple, which is to add “Network Services” to the MSDC service permission group along with the other accounts and set the service to start up Automicatically.
As I mentioned earlier FAST needs better error handling…………..:(
Have a nice day !!!!
[...] technologies is shedding light on SharePoint’s failure to handle error messaging. In, “FAST Post Setup Configuration Failed,” several weaknesses of the SharePoint error messaging system are [...]