Force TFS to use relative paths or update locations

Question

I installed TFS 2008 Workgroup Edition a while back, and everything was running fine.

Recently I tried opening TFS to a couple of friends so that we can collaborate on a project. The Source Control portion is working correctly, but the Documents and Reports folders are not available (they have red crosses on them).

When I looked at the properties, I noticed that the URLs were using my internal machine name, not the external address (e.g. http://INTERNALNAME/Sites/MyProject instead of http://www.EXTERNAL-NAME.com/Sites/MyProject).

My preference would be to somehow use relative paths, so that if I ever decide to stop exposing TFS to the outside, I don't have to do anything.

I realize this may not be possible because TFS cannot make the assumption that Reporting Services and Share Point are on the same machine.... so is there at least an easy way to assign a new server name?

Answer 1

Yeah, relative paths cannot be used due to the way that TFS works - it sends back the full URL's to the Sharepoint and Reporting Services servers to the client machine.

To update the URL's that are used for sharepoint and reporting services to match your fully qualified domain name you want to use TFSAdminUtil. Remote desktop to the TFS server, open a Command Prompt window, and change directories to %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server\Tools.

At the command prompt, type the following command (all on one line):

  TfsAdminUtil ConfigureConnections /SharepointUri:BaseSiteURL
        /SharepointSitesUri:SharePointSite
        /SharepointAdminUri:SharePointAdministration
        /ReportsUri:ReportsUri
        /ReportServerUri:ReportServer

Replacing the following strings

• SharePointSite is the new URI for the SharePoint Products and Technologies site collection.
• SharePointAdministration is the new URI for the SharePoint Central Administration Web site (used for new team project creation)
• ReportsUri is the new URI for SQL Server Reporting Services.
• ReportServer is the new URI for the ReportsService.asmx Web service.

BTW - If you have installed SP1 for Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server, the ReportServer parameter will not function correctly and you have to stick /ReportService.asmx on the end. For more information about this problem and its resolution, see this KB: Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1 TfsAdminUtil.exe 'ConfigureConnections' fails to properly set ReportServerUri.

For example, the following command would work with TFS 2008 SP1:

TfsAdminUtil ConfigureConnections /SharepointUri:http://tfs.external-name.com /SharepointSitesUri:http://tfs.external-name.com/Sites /SharepointAdminUri:http://tfs.external-name.com:17483 /ReportsUri:http://tfs.external-name.com/Reports /ReportServerUri:http://tfs.external-name.com/ReportServer/ReportService.asmx

One last thing to note is that if you are accessing your TFS server externally, then it is recommended that you do this using HTTPS to encrypt the TFS traffic. For more information on this configuration see the post on the MSDN site: Walkthrough: Setting up Team Foundation Server with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and an ISAPI Filter