Fast for SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Crawler is Dead

2011, May 19

Lately, I installed Fast locally on my machine for development purposes, and it was working as intended. Crawled a lot of local (and external) content, but suddenly, my Enterprise crawler was not working. nctrl status showed me that the Enterprise crawler was Dead

img 52a49f3c8a943

but WHY it was dead? I had no idea at all! Checking the event logs only told me:

  • M05020-DHEVMU98:13260: Process crawler was not running, restarting it
  • M05020-DHEVMU98:13260: Process crawler ports are already in use, will not start it

After checking the port 13260 on my machine, I concluded that there was nothing wrong with it. But that port, 13260 is the node controller, the enterprise crawler doesn't use that port. After checking the hostsconfiguration.xml I concluded that I made a mistake: This file contains a property: baseport with value 13000. That day, I created a new SharePoint webapplication on port 13000. I always create new web applications at those ranges (10000, 11000, 12000), it's a automatism of me. After deleting that web application, my Fast Enterprise crawler is up and running again! Too bad that the Fast Logging doesn't include portnumbers in their errorlog when a port is already occupied .

Conclusion: never create a webapplication in the 13000 range when running Fast locally ;)