Build Controller and Build Agents for TFS 2012 stop immediately after they are started

Scenario:

The build controller and the build agents stop within few seconds, after started.

Reason:

The “Visual Studio Team Foundation Build Service Host 2012” service depends upon the “Remote Access Connection Manager” service and the “Telephony” service.

Resolution:

The dependencies of the “Remote Access Connection Manager” service and the “Telephony” service are not shown in the “properties” of the “Visual Studio Team Foundation Build Service Host 2012” service.

Start the above mentioned two dependency services (whichever is not started), then the build controller and build agents do not stop abruptly.

Note: The “Remote Access Connection Manager” is dependent on “Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol Service” . Also, the “Telephony” service is dependent on “Plug and Play” service and “Remote Procedure Call” service. It will be a good practice to check if these extra services are started as well.

Content Created By: Abhilash Owk

Content Reviewed By: Romit Gulati

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 20, 2013
  Can you provide information as to why TFS requires these services to be running and where I can find the official documents showing the dependencey. My enterprise IT policy requres these services to be disabled meaning I need to show justification and explain why they are needed.

• Anonymous
  April 10, 2013
  Hi Patrick, Thanks for pointing out this question. On a discussion with the products team, it was confirmed that these services are to be enabled as long as we install and configure the TFS Build services. Once the configuration is done, the TFS build service becomes self-sufficient and will not need these set ot services any more. These set of services can be disabled. The changes will be made accordingly on this blog soon. Let me know if this information helps. Thanks, Abhilash Owk

• Anonymous
  August 21, 2016
  Is this still a requirement for the vNext build?