Team Foundation services are not available from server - The remote name could not be resolved

Question

We are working with Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010. We did not have any problems for about half a year, but:

Since a couple of days we get the following error: Team Foundation services are not available from server (...) The remote name could not be resolved; (...)

The problem occurs randomly (we are unable - yet - to pinpoint the conditions on which it occurs) and persists until we restart Visual Studio. The problem occurs about 8 times per day per developer.

Because we seem not to get past this problem and we cannot find anybody writing about this specific combination (the error and the 'remote name' part), I thought it wise to ask you guys about it ;) . Could anyone please help?

Answer 1

This is a client, server or infrastructure related problem on network level. The DNS entry for your TFS server cannot be resolved correctly at times for host dfz-vm223.

Suggestions for troubleshooting:

1. On some developer systems, replace the hostname dfz-vm223 by the ip-address of the TFS server. If the problem stop occuring there the DNS system is instable.
2. Setup a continuous ping stream (ping -t dfz-vmm223 from command window) and see if the host system is pingable in case you have TFS server problems.

Answer 2

Just found out what the problem was: the problem is proxy related. When we disable our proxy, the problem is gone. It appears our proxy and TFS are troublesome together. If anyone experiences the same problem and you are working with a proxy server, I would suggest you try disabling the proxy too.