So you just finish installing TFS, it works great and you’re about to give out the name to all your devs so they can start using the great new features in TFS but the name of the server uses corporate naming standard and is called rtmtgbs001 that is a great name for the ITO folks they know the scheme and can find that server to patch it and all that but for devs and project manager, and other consumers of TFS data it’s a bit hard to remember and if you have many servers it because quite difficult to remember.
So you create a new url in DNS called tfs.myorg.mycompany.com viable internally (note I’m not talking about make it available on the internet yet that will be implemented in SP1 I’ll come back to that when I have more info) so what should you do to accomplish this. Here are the steps to do that for a single server install (note this probably will work for a dual server install as well I just have not tested it). Note also that this is not I repeat not are windows server rename, the name (netbios, domain sid, etc) stays the same, its just to change the access of TFS to a friendlier name.
I’m writing this entry to try to unravel the mystery of this, I have looked around on the internet to find a solution for this and got a lot of conflicting answers in forums and in the Microsoft documentation. So I contacted my friends at Microsoft and got what needed to be done. This may vary from site to site but at least it will be mostly correct. As always test this before implementing in production. I have done those steps on my production servers and all is good.
Step 1) Run TFSAdminUtil ActivateAT with new friendly name this updates any internal references to use a friendly name, including the web service subscriptions.
TFSAdminUtil ActivateAT tfs.myorg.mycompany.com
Step 2) In order for the Team Sites to be able to display the reports web parts from reporting services correctly you need to go to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\TeamFoundation\ReportServer and change the key to the friendly name.
Step 3) Go to :\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server\Web Services and edit the Web.config file note that all the [] brackets should be <> it's just that html being what it is none if my quotes where visible it tought it was html.
Change
[ADD value="http://rtmtgbs001:8080" key="TFSNameUrl" /]
[ADD value="rtmtgbs001 " key="TFS Name" /]
To
[ADD value="http://tfs.myorg.mycompany.com:8080" key="TFSNameUrl" /]
[ADD value="tfs.myorg.mycompany.com" key="TFS Name" /]
There is also a comment key called TFSUrlPublic uncomment it and change to friendly name this is required so the project alert WI links use the friendly name
Change
[ADD value="https://www.microsoft.com:8081" key="TFSUrlPublic" /]
To
[ADD value="http:// tfs.myorg.mycompany.com:8080" key="TFSUrlPublic" /]
Step 4) we need to fix the TFSServerScheduler config file, first stop the service in services management console then go to :\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server\TFSServerScheduler and edit TFSServerScheduler.exe.config
Change
[ADD value="http://rtmtgbs001 :8080" key="BisDomainUrl" /]
To
[ADD value="http:// tfs.myorg.mycompany.com:8080" key="TFSNameUrl" /]
This change is necessary to ensure that the scheduler goes to the correct URL to kick the adapters. Note that BisDomainUrl was changed to TFSNameUrl this is not a typo.
Step 5) I would suggest an IISRESET and you should be good to go.
So to recap, make sure you have the new name available in your company DNS before proceeding, try to browse to the new name url like http://tfs.myorg.mycompany.com before proceeding to see if you can see the top level WSS site like before. If you feel confident that the name is resolvable, then proceed with steps 1 to 5.