Errors when installing a SharePoint 2010 Farm with FAST a.k.a. RTM

A fellow SharePointer was having many strange errors when installing SharePoint 2010. He suffered, reached out for help all around and at the end it turned out to be something pretty simple. The problem was that the communication between the Fast Admin server and the query server worker node was not working.

After running the command get-fastsearchsecurityworkernode from the Fast Admin server, you get this:

dead net.tcp://fastservername.com:13279/

Also when he did the installation of Fast for SharePoint he was able to crawl just fine but when doing a search he got this:

“The search request was unable to connect to the Search Service.”

Oh FAST for SharePoint….

Solution: The firewall needs to be turned ON during installation

You can read the full installation requirements here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff381239.aspx#BKMK_WindowsFirewallMustBeConfiguredOnAllServers