Tips on Connecting FAST Search service to SharePoint 2010

I was chatting with officemate and fellow Ascentium Rocket Scientist Keith Cornia last week, and he was expressing an issue he's been having with SharePoint 2010 connecting to FAST Search. It took some investigation and researching around to find an answer, but he did solve the problem. Anyone else out there having this issue with SharePoint 2010 and FAST search?

Keith: !@#%!

Me: What’s up?

Keith: I can’t connect to a search service using FAST Search. I still don’t have access but ran across an obscure hotfix for FAST search on SharePoint where the WIF (Windows Identity Foundation) was not in the 3.5 SP1 and the FAST search proxy server could not find the assembly. It took a bit to find the hotfix but now I’ve got the service running. I found the hotfix at: (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=eb9c345f-e830-40b8-a5fe-ae7a864c4d76&displaylang=en) 

Me: What a pain! What did you do?

Keith: After ensuring that I had .net 3.5 SP1 installed for running FAST Search Server for SharePoint I was still have issues. I opened up a cmd and checked the status of my services via nctrl –status and low and behold, “FAST Search QRProxy Service” was not running! I couldn’t figure out the reason until I looked at the event log and saw that it was trying to load the assembly “Microsoft.IdentityModel.dll”. After search the MSDN site I found that this was part of the System.identitymodel.dll which in turn is part of the Windows Identity Foundation. 

Keith then went on to say “The hunt was on… I wanted to see if WIF was installed. I went to the following directory (..\program files\reference assemblies\Microsoft) and viola! No Windows identity Foundation folder! So once again off to Bing to figure out what is going on and finally find a hotfix at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=eb9c345f-e830-40b8-a5fe-ae7a864c4d76&displaylang=en 

Me: Keith went on to say if customers are having issues with connecting to a search service using FAST Search, they might want to make sure they have this hotfix installed. Last I heard, he was on to configuring Fast Search….stay tuned!