So we learn stuff everyday... well I hope. Here is a bit of insight on Team Build, specifically the ports that need to be opened for it to work properly in a multi-machine scenario.
I have tested this configuration internally and it works great. I did stumbled upon a problem while testing, an error message came up telling me that the build server could only be configured for a single TFS server, and that I should change a parameter on the build server to point to my TFS server. So here is what we need to do to fix that
Logon to the Build server and open file [install drive]:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\tfsbuildservice.exe.config in this file we can customize the TFS server that is allowed to run Team Build.
In order to do this we need to change the AllowedTeamServer key/value pair and put in our TFS server in this format http://tfsserver:8080 once this is done we need to restart the Team Build Service and we should be good to go.
I noticed that there is also a key for the port which is 9191 by default. I'm sure you can change it there but what I am unsure of is if you need to do anything on the application tier to let it know which port the Build Server uses. I will dig into this a bit more and get back to you on this.
There is a way to not use UNC and use WebDav instead. Here is a great forum article with answer by Buck Hodges that points to other articles about how to do just that right here
Hope this helps some of you out there who are wondering how the heck do I configure this Team Build beast...
Again let me know if this was useful
Cheers,
ET
Update: After speaking with Buck Hodges I confirmed a few things... So in the config file the port key is indeed the port that the build service will use to do the remoting communication with the AT. In order to configure building on an alternate port, we need to change the web.config will for the AT at this location [install drive]:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server\Web Services\Build and change the port key to the new port. Since this is a web.config file the server will restart by itself no need to recycle it. What this means is that if we have muliple build server that the AT communicates to, we need to change the port and AllowedTeamServer keys on the build server config file to match. So with this info we noticed that the relationship is one TFS Server to multiple build server and only on TFS server per build server.
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