need help sharing managed metadata service between farms

Question

I'm having an issue sharing our managed metadata service with another farm in our company.

Both farms are on the same AD Domain, but are otherwise separate.

I've only got access to the publishing farm, someone else is in charge of the consumer farm.

I've published the farm and given permissions to the account they believe they are using.

When they try to consume the service, they are getting a 403 error.

Any idea where I would look to see whats going on here?

I looked at the logging settings, and was going to go into central admin to set the Managed metadata service logging level to verbose, but I don't see Managed metadata in that huge list of things you can turn logging on and off for.

Additionally, I thought maybe the IIS Logs would at least reveal the user ID coming across with the 403, but alas, Managed Metadata is in the web collection "Sharepoint web Services" and yet that one website does not appear to have any IIS logs (the folder for it is empty - not sure where those are going - IIS shows them going to the folder I am looking at)

Has anyone ever shared the Managed metadata service? Any gotchas or obvious omissions I might have made on my end?

• Jack

Answer 1

Make sure you do it in the correct order and configure everything correctly

1. For MMS, make sure both farms are using at least SPS Standard
2. Exchange the certificates between the farms
   1. On the consuming farm, export root and STS certificate
   2. Import those two certs on the publishing farm
   3. On the publishing farm, export the root cert
   4. Import that cert on the consuming farm
3. Set permissions on the SA's in the publishing farm on the FarmID (GUID) of the consuming farm
   1. First set permissions on the Application Discovery SA
   2. Set permissions on the SA you want to publish
4. Publish the Service app on the publishing farm
5. Connecta the SA on the consuming farm (using the URI you got when publishing it
6. Done!

Good Luck

Answer 2

Not sure if you have written everything that you did so far to publish/subscribe the service across the farm. Technet has good set of articles specifically for scenario like this:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff621100.aspx

And a blog entry to automate some of the tasks mentioned above:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mcsnoiwb/archive/2010/02/05/how-to-publish-a-managed-metadata-service-for-cross-farm-consumption.aspx