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Fast Search – Unexpected error occurred while communicating with Administration Service

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With Fast Search for SharePoint(FS4SP)installation, you might encounter this error at multiple places.

Below are the few places where I have encountered with this error:

1)      Navigate to Fast Query SSA from Central Admin à Manage services Application. Click on Fast Query SSA. Then click on “Fast Search Administration” link on the left hand side

2)      In a site collection navigate to site collection settings page. And on this page clicking on the links

  • FAST Search Keywords
  • FAST Search Site Promotion and demotion
  • FAST Search user context

To resolve this please follow the below steps:

Adding Application Pool account to FASTSearchAdministrators group

The Application pool account of the Web Application should be granted access to the FAST search engine. On my single server machine installation I followed the below steps:

  • Open Active Directory Users and Computers
  • Nagivate to domain control in the tree view
  • Click on Users and look for group names “FASTSearchAdministratorsGroup” (In generally this group can be found in local users and groups on the systems that have FASTsearch installed)

Note: if you cannot find a group by this name, you can create one with same name

  • Double click the group navigate to Member tab,  click add and enter the account fo the app pool being used.

Note: Please add the App pool account used by central Admin too this group is not already present

Creating FASTSearchSearchSettingGroup for the site collection

Run the below command in FAST Search Shell to check if the FASTSearchSearchSettingGroup(which manages the keywords, promotions and demotions”) is created. If not created you would get the below error.

To create a group, run the below commands

  • Now in FAST Search Shell run the below command as pass the ID as Name parameter

>>New-FASTSearchSearchSettingGroup –Name <<SitecollectionGUID>>

Adding Application Pool account to FASTSearchKeywordAdministrators group

The above steps would enable to access all the links, but you might still not able to access the “FAST Search user context” under site collection administrator links.

Couple of articles on internet have mentioned that Creating “FASTSearchKeywordAdministrators” groups and adding the required accounts to this group would enable access, but this hasn’t fixed my issue yet. So, the search is still on.