The environment:
A farm with three servers: SharePoint 2010 (all rules), FAST Admin, FAST non-admin. SQL is on the SharePoint box too.
The story:
Recently, I had to reinstall the box with SP2010 and SQL. Everything seemed to be fine: installing SQL, SP2010, configuring FAST Content and Query Service Apps, crawl, search… It was like a dream, almost unbelievable. But after that I started to get an error on BA Insight Longitude Connectors admin site, when I started to play with the metadata properties: “Exception configuring search settings: ... An error occurred while connecting to or communicating with the database…”
I went to the FAST Query / FAST Search Administration / Managed Properties, and got this error: “Unexpected error occurred while communicating with Administration Service”
Of course, I went to the SQL Server’s event log, where I found this error: “Login failed for user 'MYDOMAIN\svc_user'. Reason: Failed to open the explicitly specified database” On the Details tab I could see the ‘master’ as the related DB.
I went to SQL Server Profiler, but the Trace told the same.
Of course, I checked everything around FAST: the user was in the FASTSearchAdministrators group, permission settings were correct on SQL, etc.
Finally, I found what I was looking for: Event Log on the FAST admin server contained this error: “System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Cannot open database "FASTSearchAdminDatabase" requested by the login. The login failed. Login failed for user 'MYDOMAIN\svc_user'”
The solutions:
Yes, it was what I was looking for: I really forgot to restore the FASTSearchAdminDatabase. But what to do if you don’t have a backup about that?
Never mind, here is the Powershell command for you:
Install-FASTSearchAdminDatabase -DbServer SQLServer.mydomain.local -DbName FASTSearchAdminDatabase
Voilá, it’s working again! :)