FAST Search - Don't let the Byte Order Marks bite!

I recently ran into the situation described in this post:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/speschka/archive/2010/05/25/solving-configuration-failures-with-non-admin-nodes-in-fast-search-for-sharepoint.aspx

The configuration wizard was failing on the non-admin nodes. In particular, I ran into checklist item 2, an invisible Byte Order Mark (BOM) at the beginning of the file. With the help of a friendly Microsoft engineer, I ran through the steps in checklist item 3 and the cmdlet, 'Set-FASTSearchIPSec -Create -Verbose', failed. This is described in the following kb article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2028971

It turned out that even though I was copying and pasting the deployment.xml using notepad to get rid of the BOM, it was the wrong copy of deployment.xml!

THE DEPLOYMENT.XML YOU MUST FIX IS LOCATED ON THE ADMIN NODE AT:

%FastSearch%\etc\config_data\deployment\deployment.xml

In order to see the BOM, or to verify that it’s gone, open the file in your favorite hex editor. I used HexEdit trial software. So think twice before using visual studio 2010 to author your FAST deployment.xml file. :)