Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Remember to give your SharePoint 2010 Information Worker Virtual Machine a fresh certificate

As I wrote in January, the default self signed certificate for FAST for SharePoint is valid for one year.

Some days ago this certificate expired within the Microsoft Information Worker VM. The reason I noticed is because I’m currently conduction a FAST for SharePoint workshop in Brussels, and this very morning all the attendees got the same error
Failed to connect to demo2010a.contoso.com:13391 Failed to initialize session with document engine: Unable to resolve Contentdistributor


Certainly not the easiest error to decode, but as I lectured on the importance of the validity period of the certificate yesterday I got on the right track in not too long…. after checking some logs in FAST and not finding anything in particular.

So we added the certificate replacement as an ad-hoc exercise.

If you want to fix this the quick way, here are the steps you need to take to get indexing back up on the image, and read my previous post as to how you can extend this longer than a year.


In a FAST PowerShell Command
net stop FASTSearchMonitoring
net stop FASTSearchService
cd C:\FASTSearch\installer\scripts
.\ReplaceDefaultCertificate.ps1 -generateNewCertificate $true

net start FASTSearchService
net start FASTSearchMonitoring


In a SharePoint PowerShell Command
cd C:\FASTSearch\installer\scripts
.\SecureFASTSearchConnector.ps1 –certPath "..\..\data\data_security\cert\FASTSearchCert.pfx" –ssaName "FASTContent" –username "contoso\administrator"
iisreset