Planning › FAST ESP Installation Planning

FAST ESP Installation Planning

To help you plan for a successful FAST ESP installation and configuration, use the following information to research and gather information.

• Research—Complete the following steps:
  • Read the Release Notes and the FAST ESP Installation Guide to understand the installation requirements, such as supported hardware, operating systems, and their combinations, as well as the default search capabilities for the FAST ESP search engine.

    Important! There is a known issue with installing FAST ESP on a server with Daylight Savings Time enabled. For more information, see the Release Notes.

  • Read your FAST ESP documentation to become familiar with the FAST ESP search engine, learn how to configure and deploy it for optimal query performance, and how to properly secure the engine. The FAST ESP installation guide is provided on the CA Service Desk Manager installation media.
• Installation Home Directory—Determine the home directory in which you want to install FAST ESP. By default, the home directory for the FAST ESP installation is C:\FastESP (Windows) and /opt/FastESP (Linux).
• After the installation—Configure Knowledge Management to use the FAST ESP search engine.

  Note: For more information, see the Administration Guide.

  Important! FAST ESP does not install correctly if there are any traces of a previous or current FAST ESP installation on your server. Be sure to close all FAST ESP processes and uninstall the product before attempting to install FAST ESP.

• Server and User Configuration—Complete the following steps:
  • Have the fully-qualified domain name or IP address (recommended) of the dedicated server on which you install FAST ESP.

    Important! The server must have a static IP address. If the server does not have a static IP address, do not continue with the installation. Reconfigure the server with a static IP address and then continue with the installation.

  • Determine a user name and password for FAST ESP security administration. This user is added to the Administrative group and has special security to log on as a service.

    Important! When you log into FAST ESP for the first time, you must use the user name "admin" with no password. After this initial login, you can create users, groups and change the default user password. For more information about the initial FAST ESP login, see the FAST ESP Home Guide.

  • (Linux) Create your FAST ESP user. On Windows, this user is automatically created during the FAST ESP installation, but on Linux, you must manually create this user.

    Important! This FAST user is a local user only; it is not a domain user.

  • External repository searches only work when the collection is called site. If you already have a collection in place, it cannot be used unless its called site. This allows documents to be properly indexed.

    Note: For information about creating and configuring collections, see the FAST ESP Configuration Guide.

  • When setting the limit of pure text size of attachments per document, set the max-index-size parameter for the filetext and attstext fields of the index profile between 0 and 2GB. The default value is 8196KB.

    Note: For more information about max-index-size, see the FAST ESP Configuration Guide.

• Antivirus Software—Temporarily disable any antivirus software scanning on the computer on which you install FAST ESP.