TFS Agent idle/offline at Deploy test agent task - tfs

TFS 2015 update 3 test agent goes idle/sleep every time I queue a build. I have automated UI build running test on my system itself. I have to manually refresh the agent every time.
Couple of other issues-
1.Access is denied error with WinRM even though nothing has been changed. This comes in subsequent runs. Will have to delete and re configure agent from start when this happens.
2.Agent is locked or sleep.
Please help.

Related

The session for this agent already exists

I am using TFS to execute a nightly build that includes several steps that use the TFS Test Agent. I am running the latest version of TFS/Test Agent(2015 - Update 3) and there are no other builds being run at this time. Often(maybe half the time), when the nightly job is run the step "Visual Studio Test Agent Deployment" fails with the following error:
The job has been abandoned because agent Agent-XXX did not renew the
lock. Ensure agent is running, not sleeping, and has not lost
communication with the service.
This is due to the error found in the Test Agent's log file(under _diag):
The session for this agent already exists. Sleeping for 30 seconds
before next retry.
Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.WebApi.TaskAgentSessionConflictException:
The task agent Agent-XXX already has an active session for owner XXX.
This issue is directly referenced here, and indirectly talked about here.
The solution I've found to this issue is to restart the server that the test agent is running on, this clears any dead sessions, and after the server starts back up, the tests run just fine. I think this is effectively what is being done in the previously mentioned post. The result of resetting the configs is that the service is restarted.
While being presented as a solution in the linked article, it is only temporary. Even after the server has been restarted and the build runs successfully, the next day the issue will again reappear necessitating manual intervention to get the build to run.
I could schedule a task to reset the service or even restart the server directly before the nightly build is run, but it strikes me as a bandage rather than a fix. Has anyone experienced this issue before, and if so is there any way to prevent it from occurring in the first place?
Update 1
I simply set up a build that runs 5 minutes before my main tests that runs a Bat script to restart all my servers hosting my test agents. This is a workaround, but one that seems to resolve the issue. Hopefully someday someone can come up with a better solution than this, but for now, it's how I have to run automated testing in TFS.
Update 2
I have three servers now, all three exhibit the same issue, though it is hard to pin down exactly when it occurs. Scaling up the workaround without creating downtime it proving to be quite challenging.
Update 3
A better day came, I upgraded TFS to 2018, and the build agent to the latest version, this issue no longer occurs, I think its a bug in the old build agent. I still don't have a solution for the original version of the build agent...
t sounds like a process Agent.Listener.exe was running under somewhere on the machine, maybe as a service (not a logged in user session).
note, if an agent process is abruptly terminated while it has an active session, the session will eventually timeout (after 5 minutes i think). and on startup, if an agent encounters session conflict then it will retry for up to 5.5 minutes i think before giving up (enough time for an abruptly terminated session to expire).
i'm going to go ahead and close this and assume a process was running somewhere. we havent had any issues in this area and haven't heard any other reports, so i dont think there is an issue here with the agent. if you find a repro, or it looks like i'm wrong then please reopen.

TFS 2015 Update 2 Build Failed

We're running TFS 2015 update 2. When a build starts, it says "Waiting for an agent" then, 2 seconds after, the build fails. I looked whether the agent pools were running, and all of them were on green (as I understand this is expected). Also, I looked whether the TFSJobsAgent was running, and it's ok. If I download the zip log from de build process, it is empty, so i don't know what i'm doing wrong. i tried to create a new agent pool, and run the build process on that agent, but i got the same result.
Any ideas on how to tackle/solve this?
PS: All the builds were working fine a week ago.
The build service account needs to be a member of the Build Service Accounts group.
You also need to check whether the build agent service is running.

One execution per Windows VMware VM as Jenkins slaves?

I am trying to run some automated acceptance tests on a windows VM but am running into some problems.
Here is what I want, a job which runs on a freshly reverted VM all the time. This job will get an MSI installer from an upstream job, install it, and then run some automated tests on it, in this case using robotframework (but that doesn't really matter in this case)
I have setup the slave in the vSphere plugin to only have one executor and to disconnect after one execution. On disconnect is shutsdown and reverts. My hope was this meant that it would run one Jenkins job and then revert, the next job would get a fresh snapshot, and so would the next and so on.
The problem is if a job is in queue waiting for the VM slave, as soon as the first job finishes the next one starts, before the VM has shutdown and reverted. The signal to shutdown and revert has however been sent, so the next job is almost immedieatly failed as the VM shuts down.
Everything works fine as long as jobs needing the VM aren't queued while another is running, but if they are I run into this problem.
Can anyone suggest a way to fix this?
Am I better off using vSphere build steps rather than setting up a build slave in this fashion, if so how exactly do I go about getting the same workflow to work using buildsteps and (i assume) pipelined builds.
Thanks
You can set a 'Quiet period' - it's in Advanced Project Options when you create a build. You should set it at the parent job, and this is the time to wait before executing the dependent job
If you'll increase the wait time, the server will go down before the second job starts...
Turns out the version of the vSphere plugin I was using was outdated, this bug problem is fixed in the newer version

What would happened if jenkins get restarted at the time of execution of jenkins job

Suppose i have set a Jenkins job from 12 pm to 1pm. Let us say job has been started. Now suppose Administrator has set Jenkins to be restarted at 12:30 PM. What would happen- will my script gets paused or gets failed?
Surely your builds will abort if jenkin is going for a restart/shutdown. I have seen some cases where you lose even the build log for that particular build.
(jenkins_url)/safeRestart. This will allow all running builds to complete.
(jenkins_url)/restart will force a restart without waiting for builds to complete.

How reboot Jenkins with running build queue?

Our Jenkins performs massive integration tests. The longer the jenkins is running, the longer the tests need. Thus we restart the Jenkins server every night via cronjob. Meanwhile the build queue is too long to be finished and the currently running job is canceled and a fail. That's ugly. I found the Safe Restart Plugin, but that waits for empty build queues. Ideally I would have a job which could be priorized to also reboot at every wanted time during the day. This job needs to perform the reboot as the safe restart plugin would do if no jobs where left.

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