SP2010 Fast Search

FAST Overview and Planning:

Compare SharePoint search products:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff631149.aspx

Index connectors:
The FAST Search connector crawls:
- SharePoint sites
- Web sites
- File shares that contain content such as Microsoft Office documents
- Exchange public folders
- Line of business data, for example content from databases
- Custom repositories, accessed with a custom built connector

A content source in the FAST Search Content Search Service Application (Content SSA) is a set of options that you can use to specify what kind of content is crawled, what URLs to crawl, and how deep and when to crawl.

You can create up to 500 content sources in the Content SSA, and each content source can contain as many as 500 start addresses.
You can only crawl one kind of content per content source.

Custom indexing connector: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee556429.aspx

Before you can start incremental crawls of one or more content sources, the system must first complete a full crawl.

Federation (Type of connections)
Search index on this server
FAST Search index.
OpenSearch 1.0 or 1.1

Authentication:
The content access account that you use must have read permissions on all content that is crawled

FAST Search Web crawler
The FAST Search Web crawler is typically a component inside a FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint installation. Internally, the FAST Search Web crawler is organized as a collection of processes and logical entities, which in most cases run on a single server. When the number of Web sites or total number of pages to be crawled is large, the FAST Search Web crawler can be scaled up by distributing these processes across multiple hosts. This requires additional configuration. It can crawl HTTP, HTTPS and FTP content and supports NTLM version 1 (and to a limited extend version 2), Digest, basic auth and form based logon authentication. RSS scheduling is supported and you can tag linked documents from the feed.

FAST Deep dive videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh26u-OidLg
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Speakers/Jeff-Fried

Deployment steps:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff381267.aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff381240.aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff381261.aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff354931.aspx(deployment.xml)http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff381251.aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg710538.aspx(installation wizard fails)
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff393738.aspx(unable to connect, cert issue)
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff381253.aspx (enable queries)http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff381272.aspx (verification)http://fastforum.info/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=223 (no results issue)

Configure Authorization:
If Get-FASTSearchSecurityClaimsUserStore does not return anything then configure below steps,
1. From the FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint, open a Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint shell under the user account of a user who is a member of the local FASTSearchAdministrators group and run the following commands.
New-FASTSearchSecurityClaimsUserStore -id win
Set-FASTSearchSecurityDefaultUserStore -DefaultUserStoreId win
2. Repeat step 1 on each query server.

If you added the fast admin account to the local admin group on the server, please remove it. It should only be a part of the FASTServerAdministrators group on the server.
http://digsharepoint.blogspot.com/2011/06/unable-to-get-any-search-results-fast.html
Remember the behavior mentioned in the above link will exist if you try to query fast locally (using http://localhost:13280) or from SharePoint using an account that is added to the administrators group on the FAST server.

Other references:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee781286.aspx
Availability / Fault Tolerance
http://searchunleashed.wordpress.com/2011/07/15/sharepoint-search-and-fast-search-for-sharepoint-architecture-diagrams-fault-tolerance-and-performance/