TFS 2013, only partial success on builds. "An error occurred while copying diagnostic activity logs to the drop location"

Question

I know this problem has been reported quite a few times, but the solutions I've found didn't work for me. The setup:

1. We performed an upgrade of TFS 2010 to TFS2013 As described in one of the upgrade manuals we have backed up the databases and analysis services key and restored them on a different box. Let's call this new box boxTFS2013. Initially the entire setup was done there and, some sharepoint problems aside, it was successful. But the build services started reporting this problem:

   "An error occurred while copying diagnostic activity logs to the drop location. Details: The HTTP request timed out after 00:01:40."

   Pretty much everything associated with TFS, including the build service runs on the account DOMAIN\TFSService. Nothing is on NTNetworkAuthority

2. As a second step we created a new build server, boxBUILD2013, installed the build services there and uninstalled the build services from boxTFS2013. Again the very same problem - the builds succeed partially and the same log copy failure occurs.

The setup now is as follows:

The TFS2013, SQL and Sharepoint is on the boxTFS2013 (Sharepoint is about to be moved). TFS2013 is running on the DOMAIN\TFSService account.

Build services are set up on boxBUILD2013. There is one controller and two agents. The working folder for the agents is d:\BUILD, the account is DOMAIN\TFSService. The drop folder is on the same box, e:\BUILDS (name about to be changed after we resolve our current problems).

Normally people resolve this problem by giving the build agent rights to write to the drop folder. This was so from the very beginning (that domain account always had access) but the problem persists. Just to verify that the problem is not associated with permissions I have given the account Everyone full control rights over: d:\BUILD and e:\Builds

The xml build definition, as far as I can tell, does not contain anything out of ordinary. The builds drop the files where they are supposed to, the partial failure only occurs on the log. I'm out of ideas really. Can anyone advise, please?

Answer 1

Solution: Increae the timeout within C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 12.0\Tools\TFSBuildServiceHost.exe.config
by adding

<appSettings> 
<add key="ServerDrop.MaxRequestTimeInSeconds" value="300"/>
</appSettings>

Herbert