Today I dived into installing FAST evaluation version at my home server. First thing I see in the Admin GUI Logs is an error thrown something like below:
“Could not connect to config server at 16005”
Initially the error doesn't tell you much about the real issue, but having a closer look at logs list it was complaining something about "License file cannot be checked out".
Well there can be few reasons for this license file complaint, either the format of port details or FQDN or any other entry is not right as it should be or something else that could be missed easily. So I went into the /etc directory where FAST was installed and looked at fastsearch.lic fileAt closer look only (or may be because of my dumbness LOL!!) I found that the license file was expired. So there we go all I have to do is to request for another evaluation version and upgrade my license file at this location:
FASTSEARCH%\etc\fastsearch.lic and restart FAST installation. (restart is done by simply going into Start->Programs->FAST ESP->Stop FAST->Start FAST)
Note: Even the evaluation version is not freely available you will have to be a partner or customer of FAST/Microsoft to be able to get a valid license.
Cheers,
Kunal
