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Problems configuring Team Foundation Server 2010 to use a Fully Qualified Domain Name

As transparancy is important for us, we expose our Team Foundation Server environment to our customers. Of course we use a public domain name to let our customers access the TFS environment.

First I configured our DNS Server internally to ensure that the FQDN points to an internal IP Address when users are connected to the network (to avoid having to route out to the internet and back). Then for external access, I added an A record for the FQDN to the DNS zone file for our domain.

Unfortunately when I opened the web access, the links  to the sharepoint portal and the report website were still pointing to the internal server name.

So I opened the very nice TFS Admin Console, selected the  Application Tier, then clicked on Change URLS. I changed the Public Url field  to the FQDN and let the Server Url continue to use the machine name.

Next I selected Application Tier > SharePoint Web Applications, then selected the top row in the list within the SharePoint Web Applications list box. By clicking 'Change SharePoint Web Application' and putting the FQDN in the Friendly Name and Web Application Url fields our Sharepoint configuration was fine.

At last I selected Application Tier > Reporting and clicked Edit. I updated the  the Warehouse Database, Analysis Services Database, Report Server Url and Report Manager url so that they also were using the FQDN.

After this was completed I restarted all services. But when I tried to connect to Team Foundation Server everything failed!

It took me a lot of time to figure out that I had to disable the Loop Back Check on the TFS Server. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926642. This is required otherwise the TFS Admin Console will throw errors as it won't be able to access your FQDN.

After a server restart I was finally good to go!

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