After dilly-dallying with trying to figure out why I was getting a 26201 error on installing the Team System Application tier I decided to bite the bullet and start from scratch and rebuild the Application tier image. This time I went step-by-step through the install roadmap, following each direction to a tee. Through this excercise, the only thing that I can think of where I might have screwed up before was the time at which I applied the Windows Critical Updates. It might not have occurred at the exact spot the roadmap wanted me to apply them (shame on me).

From 9:00PM to around 2:00AM, I went through each step of installing the Application tier and after each critical step, I would copy off the image for an easy rollback if need be. I’m happy to say that the Application tier is up and running and me and the ‘gssutil’ are finally playing nice. But… and there’s always a “But”… I goofed up anddecided to rename my machine image (not required for the install, but required for my sanity) from something not so obvious (WIN2K3STND) to something a little more (TEAMSYSAPP) after I already installed Sharepoint services. D’oh!

Sharepoint utilizes an MSDE database to store its information. This database, and it’s underlying tables, are directly related to the machine name. Once you change the name, Sharepoint can no longer find it’s configuration database. (Wouldn’t this be better handled through a configuration item somewhere???)

Anyhow, before realizing my Sharepoint mistake, my happy (and tired) trigger fingers wanted to test the creation of a project through the Visual Studio Team System client. It took quite some time and finished “Successful, but with some errors”, huh? From what I can determine, it errored on the creation of the Sharepoint team site (naturally) because of my goof-up. I fixed my Sharepoint problem and everyone’s happy but what I’m trying to figure out now is how can I recreate my Project in team system so everything is re-generated? Or better yet, how can I regenerate my Project’s team site in Sharepoint? I can remove the project from Visual Studio, but that only removes it from Visual Studio. It doesn’t actually delete itout of Team System. Is there suppose to be some “all-mighty”Team System admin tool that a.) I’m not seeing or b.) isn’t available in the beta1 refresh?

I’m looking forward to finally being able to dig into this thing. Just when it gets good, I’m sure they’ll release another CTP and I’ll have go through all of this again. Well, maybe not all of it. I’m sure, or should I say, I hope they resolve some of the pains of installing for the next CTP release.

Bring it on Burton team!

After fighting some network and domain issues, I was able to finally get all of my Virtual Server instances to see the domain and to see each other (don’t ask me how). It took me several install attempts at Team Foundation Server, but I finally received the coveted “Install Successful” message. Here are a couple helpful hints that the install roadmap didn’t necessarily cover (or maybe it did and I missed it):

1.) Make sure your TFSIdentity user account is in the Administrators group for both your App server and Database server.

2.) See #1

I kept getting the dreaded 26201 error and I think it had something to do with me permission setups (see helpful hint above). After verifying that everything looked correct, I was stumped. So I did what an self respecting techno wizard would’ve done and rebooted – and magically, my problem was solved. If you run into issues with Team System, it would be a good idea to check here first for an answer.

I’m not a complete 100% success factor just yet. One of the steps, after installing all of the software, is to add your user to the TFS Global Administrators Application Group. This is either done by using the gssutil.exe found in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Enterprise Server\BISIISDIR\sdk\bin directory, or through Visual Studio .NET. I struck on both.

First, the gssutil.exe returns a “Identity cannot be resolved” error. Which I can’t seem to find any help on. And using Visual Studio .NET doesn’t get me all that far. I’m able to connect to my Team System server, but when I select the ‘Settings’ option, I get all sorts of “General Access Denied” SOAP exceptions. Obviously I have a permissions issue somewhere, I just don’t know where.

All I can say at this point is… I’m gaining on it.

In the off chance that you are in the gift giving mood (or you are a family member wondering what I want this year), you can find my wish list here.

Code Magazine editor, Rod Paddock, is looking for some fellow geeks in Sioux Falls, SD to join him for a geek dinner while he’s in town.

Here’s a little update to my adventures with installing Team System…

I decided to move my Visual Studio 2003 work off onto a Virtual PC image on my laptop. A lot of the work I plan to focus on has to do with Visual Studio 2005 and I want to give as much memory and resources as I can to VS2K5. I have no problems re-imaging my machine when the time comes. I have a (somewhat) structured backup plan for my laptop that includes a base image with all my pertinent tools and applications along with a data backup of projects and outlook files. When the time comes, I can reimage my laptop pretty quickly. So I went ahead and created a WinXP Virtual PC image, installed Visual Studio 2003 plus SQL Server 2000 and tested that my apps were working properly – and they were.

The next step was to install the client tools of Visual Studio 2005 Beta1 Refresh. This went suprisingly smooth and there were no problems to report. Also suprising was the fact that Visual Studio 2005 doesn’t take nearly as long to install as Visual Studio 2003 does. Bravo! It’s also a pleasure to be able to install this off of a DVD and not have toswap CDs in and out.

The server installs are a different story. I’mstill struggling through that excercise. Some bad news that I have to report is that fact that the new 1GB of memory I just bought doesn’t want to play nice in my server. So I’m stuck at 1GB for now. My development server is a Windows Server 2003 in which I proceeded to install Virtual PC 2004 on. I received a nice little error message that stated VPC 2004 wasn’t support on Windows Server 2003. I went ahead and installed it anyways and decided to take my chances. I had no other choice to my lack of hardware resources for the Team Sytem environment.

I have a Win2K3 base image that I copied over to create two new images. One for the Team System Database Tier and the other for the application tier. I was following along some helpful instructions I found at Ben Miller’s blogand decided to make the database tier the domain controller. I created the domain controller, installed SQL 2005 Beta 2 and everything was humming.

I switched over to create my application tier on the other image. I was following the installation roadmap and everything was progressing right along until I got to the ADAM install. ADAM needs to tie into my domain. No problem, I’ll logoff my local Admin account and re-login with my domain credentials and continue along. Not! For whatever reason my application tier can’t login to the domain (BOSTLAB is not available). Funny, I was able to add the app tier to the domain from the app tier. The boxes can see each other. I don’t understand it.

So in this process of installing Team System, it’s not Team System that’s holding me up, it’s fighting through Active Directory issues. It might be a problem with it running in a VPC session but I don’t think so. This is how others have done it. I’m just overlooking something, I’m sure.

On my quest to find an answer, I noticed that I can download a copy a Virtual Server 2004 from my MSDN Universal Subscription. I proceeded to download and install the Windows Server 2003 “supported” Virtual Server. There wasa little bit of a learning curve as it’s quite a bitdifferent than Virtual PC 2004. I convereted my images over to Virtual Server 2004 but that didn’t seem to solve any domain issues.

I’m now at the point of where I’m going to remove Active Directory from the Database tier and setup my base OS with Active Directory. I’m not sure if that will solve anything but we’ll see.

So that’s where I stand now and I have to leave it at that until Sunday. And it’s going to drive me nuts too. I hate leaving things in an unfinished state. Especially when I can’t get something to work properly. But such is the case as we’re about ready to hit the road to the Quad Cities for our family’s Thanksgiving feast. I’m looking forward to going but I’m not looking forward to what I have to do to get there. It started snowing in Chicagoland around 10:00AM. The big-wet flakes kind of snow. The ground is already covered and the streets are slick. Oh joy.