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!

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME ...

Cache stampede: when our cache turned against us

While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...

The role of ActivitySource in OpenTelemetry for .NET

While doing some pair programming to integrate OpenTelemetry tracing to a .NET application, we had a discussion on how to use the ActivitySource . It looks simple. You new one up, give it a name, start an activity, done. The discussion started when we added a second ActivitySource with the exact same name in a different class. This made us wonder: "Are we duplicating traces now? Is this a memory leak? Do we need a singleton?" So we decided to dig deeper. This post is what we learned… What ActivitySource actually is ActivitySource is part of System.Diagnostics , not part of the OpenTelemetry NuGet packages. Microsoft built tracing primitives directly into the BCL, and OpenTelemetry's .NET SDK simply listens to them. This is why you can add distributed tracing to a library without taking a dependency on OpenTelemetry at all. An ActivitySource is a factory for Activity objects, and an Activity is .NET's name for what OpenTelemetry calls a span.(don’t ask m...

The art of simplicity

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