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Team Development and Software Quality with Microsofts ALM platform - since 2005

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Be aware: don't use underscores in server names

An underscore ("_") is not a supported character for a server name according to the RFC standards and therefore Windows will warn you when trying to use it as part of a DNS name.

Symptoms

ASP.NET applications that use session state, like Team System Web Access, will work when invoked using the IP (http://1.1.1.1:8090/) but will fail after some crazy redirecting with a DNS error when using the server name (http://my_tfs:8090/).

Workaround

You can add a DNS alias and avoid using underscores in server names in the future.

 

(Thanks to Hakan Eskici from Microsoft for pointing this out.)

Update: Hakan now blogged about this: Strange TSWA connection issue if the server name contains an underscore character.

Update #2: Microsoft published KB article 968549 about this.