One of the things that I’m working on as a part of the Team Foundation implementation that I’m working on is to create a series of short (10-15 minute … for me, that’s short) videos on different topics related to working with TFS within the environment. If these were generalized TFS videos, it wouldn’t be an issue but they aren’t – they are highly customized to the specific implementation and the custom template that we’re using. As a part of it, I needed to create a virtualized environment that reproduces the production environment that I could use for the videos (as well as testing). Since I want this to be as close as possible to the actual, working, production environment, I wanted to use the same URLs as we use in production. Setting up and resolving the URLs is easy enough … it’s all a private Hyper-V environment that has its own domain controller, DNS and DHCP. Adding credentials for invisible, integrated authentication was easy as well. Or so I thought … it turned out that it wasn’t as simple as I would have thought.
The URLs were all set up. I used tfsadminutil configureconnections to set the URLs in TFS so that the registration worked correctly. I cleared the TF client cache. Yet … it still didn’t work. I got errors from the client (running on the Hyper-V host system) that basically said “ummm … so sorry, it’s not working”. Looking at the app tier’s event log, I saw a series of errors including the following (this proved to be the important one):
Detailed Message: TF53002: Unable to obtain registration data for application VersionControl.
Web Request Details
Url: http://apptier.my.testurl.com/VersionControl/v1.0/repository.asmx [method: POST]
User Agent: Team Foundation (devenv.exe, 9.0.30729.1)
Headers: Content-Length=319&Content-Type=application%2fsoap%2bxml%3b+charset%3dutf-8&Accept-Encoding=gzip&Accept-Language=en-US&Expect=100-continue&Host=apptier.my.testurl.com&User-Agent=Team+Foundation+(devenv.exe%2c+9.0.30729.1)&X-TFS-Version=1.0.0.0&X-TFS-Session=09b73cf7-6f05-4528-b8d7-2b531d43a409
Path: /VersionControl/v1.0/repository.asmx
Local Request: False
Host Address: 10.5.5.1
User: TESTDOMAIN\JSawyer [authentication type: NTLM]
Exception Message: TF30063: You are not authorized to access apptier.my.testurl.com.80. (type TeamFoundationServerUnauthorizedException)
I would get this same error regardless of client (VS or TFS Web). The account being used was a domain administrator … so that ruled out that it was really an authorization issue. Besides that, it all worked find until I did all the mucking about with the URLs.
Looking about the Internets, I found a blog entry from Nick Berardi gave the solution (and yes, our current production environment in Win2K3)… I set the TFS URLs in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\DisableLoopbackCheck registry key, rebooted and voila!! It all worked!