Issue in crawl after certificate is updated in FAST Search for SharePoint 2010

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Recently we observed that our crawl was continuing for a long time without any progress. On looking at the eventlog we found the below error:

  •  "Failed to connect to SERVER Failed to initialize session with document engine: Unable to resolve Contentdistributor."

We found that FAST certificate had expired. We updated the certificate and crawl ran without issue. however, next day crawl started behaving as earlier. this time the error logged in eventlog was different:

  •  "Failed to connect to SERVER. Failed to initialize session with document engine: Unable to find master Contentdistributor.  Ensure that all Contentdistributors in the ESP installation are listed when creating icontent_manager."

On investigating we found that during the updation of the certificate, new certificate was generated on the admin node and non-admin node was still retaining the old certificate.

Issue:

      Certificate was not properly updated in all the FAST non-admin nodes.

Resolution :

  • Exported the certificate from admin node 
  • imported into non-admin node where secondary content distributor was running 
  • stopped fast services on non-admin node 
  • ran installer\scripts\replacedefaultcertificate.ps1 -thumbprint "certthumbprint" 
  • started fast services on non-admin node

More details on managing certificates can be found here.