Posterous theme by Cory Watilo

Relocating TeamCity build agents

I logged into TeamCity today and was surprised to see no active agents.  Further investigation showed that I had entirely lost the connection between the server and the agents.  This is bad.
Fortunately, there was nothing seriously wrong.  We had moved the build agents and build server to a new VM server, which had necessitated converting the VM format and installing a new set of VM tools (VMware Server => ESX).  Evidently this was enough to confuse the TeamCity server.
After verifying that IP connectivity was working, I restarted build agents.  Upon restart, the agents reconnected to the server, however they were not recognized as the same as before.  This means I lost the configuration associated with these build agents.  Since our build agents are specialized to build for different environments, I lost the mappings for particular projects to go to particular build agents.
Fortunately, TeamCity makes this kind of stuff pretty easy.  A few clicks later and I was back in business.  While it would be nice if TeamCity were a bit more resilient to changes and could recognize the agents better, this wasn’t too difficult.