Windows 2008 R2 and fast search for sharepoint SAM worker dead issue

First few days on the job and I was banging my head against the wall.  I was seeing a communication error  between the content ssa and the sam worker.  In the log files I saw the following message

AdminLibrary.dll:MakeRemoteRequestToWorker - Unable to complete request to sam worker node

But the samworker was running when doing a nctrl status.  But when looking further and doing a

get fastsearchsecurityworkernode

the process was dead

It is caused by a loopback check during authentication in windows 2008r2.  It will happen when you are running fast on a standalone machine.

To fix the issue run

setspn -A http/servername.domain.com domain\username

Live and learn


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