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.
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.