Resolving FAST Document conversion Failed error

After installing and configuring Microsoft FAST Search server, uploaded a bunch of word, pdf documents and images for crawling and indexing. Fingers crossed and waited till the Full crawl is completed in Crawl history page. Logs said that the documents were crawled successfully and ready to be queried from FAST index.

I was able to search a PDF document based on its metadata but not based on its inner content. Basic instinct goes for installing a PDF iFilters but the server behaviour is same even for Microsoft Office file formats and Jie Li's blog states that FAST comes with PDF iFilters in-built.

Tried using the DocPush from FAST toolbox as an exercise of isolating SharePoint from FAST,

docpush -c sp c:\test.doc

Docpush clearly provided me the error message "WARNING Document conversion Failed (Warning code 0)". Verified the FAST crawl logs and found the same error message there for Office file formats and PDF documents.

To resolve this you need to provide "Full Control" rights for FAST service account to folders C:\FastSearch\bin and C:\FastSearch\Tmp

Refer : KB2554579

How to open Microsoft FAST QR Server FQL console ?

         Microsoft FAST search server hosts a QR Server FQL Search console which allows us to make FQL queries from this page. This web application is hosted in port 13280. So, to access this application go to your FAST search server, open up the browser and hit http://localhost:13280

          As an interesting fact this web application is not hosted within IIS 7.0/7.5, so even stopping the IIS or World Wide Web Publishing services will not have any effect on this web application. This is a CGI application  hosted in service "FAST Search for SharePoint". Some pieces of  FAST Server is not yet fully transformed to Microsoft stack.So ensure that this service is running under services.msc console.

Host name validation failed - FAST search 2010 for SharePoint

While setting up a virtualized FAST search server in my local machine with the help of Hyper-V, post installation of FAST Search server ran the post setup configuration wizard. At one step it asked for the Server name where you want to configure, tried with many permutations and combinations but every thing ended up in a single error message box "Host name Failed" and there is not even a sample string or a help text there.

Bounced back to the documentation which spells that we should provide fully qualified domain name(FQDN) of the machine.Wizards are meant to simplify the process of configuring the servers, at-least a help text or an help button is required here.

Looks silly once the issue is resolved, still posting a screen scrap which will help another FAST explorer in dark to identify a FQDN in a server.