There are a number of useful blog posts out there on the web that talk you through setting up SharePoint's People search correctly however the following were increadibly useful to me:
Corey Roth's "How to set up People Search in SharePoint 2010" was the most helpful for me - however I think there's something different about the instance of SharePoint I'm running:
When Corey suggests giving the Default Content Access account rights in the User Profile Service Application, I didn't have the option of "Retrieve People Data for Search Crawlers", however giving it access to "User Profile Application" and "User Profile Service Application Proxy" seems to work quite nicely*.
Also, as all my browsers are set up to be British English for preference over US English, or just English, we weren't seeing any of the Nickname or Phonetic search features that are included in SharePoint 2010.
Thanks to Kristof Kowalski's post "SharePoint Server 2010 Phonetic and Nickname Search" and the results of his support request, we were able to get this working for all our British speaking users 
, and now searching for "Benjamin" will bring me back as "Ben".
Having finally installed Service Pack 1, and the June, August and October Cumulative Updates the permissions list now matches Corey's blog.
Filed under: Search, SharePoint
This is one of those jobs that looks so simple on the outside, but can lead you down a massive rabbit hole if you're not too careful:
We're in the process of changing an instance of SharePoint from a true "Single Server" setup to having the databases on a separate SQL Server, and there's plenty of documentation about that, starting with: Move all databases
We'd also followed the recommendations in Harden SQL Server for SharePoint Environments but after we'd moved the Content Database to the new server and attached it in SQL, all attempts to "Add a content database" in Central Admin resulted in errors such as:
Cannot connect to database master at SQL server at SqlServer2. The database might not exist, or the current user does not have permission to connect to it.
Digging into the ULS logs we found the following Critical errors:
Unknown SQL Exception 53 occurred. Additional error information from SQL Server is included below. A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: Named Pipes Provider, error: 40 - Could not open a connection to SQL Server)
It turns out that sometimes the SQL Configuration Manager needs a little bit of a helping hand, and you need start the Old School "SQL Server Client Network Utility" with the command (note the 8.3 format of the name):
cliconfg.exe
On the Alias tab of this app, add the Aliases you added in the SQL Configuration Manager, and you should be good to go.
Filed under: Fixes, SharePoint