Brian Harry posted last week about a hotfix for TFS 2012 QU1 (KB2795609). This should not be needed by most people, but as his post points out does fix issues for a few customers. Well we were one of those customers. When upgrading from 2012 RTM to 2012 QU1 we had attempted what with hindsight was an over ambitious hardware migration too. This involved swapping our data tier from a SQL 2012 instance to a new 2012 availability group and merging team project collections from different server as well as applying the QU1. Our migration plan contained some team project collection detach/attach steps hence getting into the area this hotfix addresses.

The end point was we ended up with a QU1 upgraded server, but we could only get users connected if we made them team project administrators, a valid short term solution, but something we needed to fix.

We therefore applied the new KB2795609 patch, but hit a gotcha that you should be aware of

  • We ran the patch EXE on our TFS server that was showing the problem.
  • This ran without error, taking about 5 minutes
  • We tried to connect to the patched TFS server via the web client and VS2012, we could make a connection to TFS but could open any TPCs
  • On checking the TFS admin console we saw the TPC was offline and reporting that the servicing had failed (but this had not been reported back via the patch tool)
  • We reran the servicing job (via the TFS admin console) but it failed in the core step we saw in the logs

[Error] TF400744: An error occurred while executing the following script: TurnOnRCSI.sql. Failed batch starts on the line 1. Statement line: 1. Script line: 1. Error: 5069 ALTER DATABASE statement failed.

  • Our TFS DBs are now stored with a SQL 2012 availability group, during the upgrade to QU1 we had seen problems applying the upgrade unless we removed the DBs from the availability groups. So we removed the tfs_configuration and tfs_[mytpc] from availability groups and re applied the servicing job and all was OK
  • Once the servicing of the TPC was completed it went online as expected.
  • We then put the DBs back into the availability group
  • We could then remove the users from the team project administrators group as their previous rights were working again.

So we now had a patched and working TFS 2012 QU1 server. Lets hope that QU2 is a little smoother and we don’t need the direct help of product group, who I must say have been great in getting this problem addressed. I really like the openness we see in Brian’s blog of both the good and the bad.