Fixing TF209009

A couple of days ago I had to set-up a build computer to do weekly builds. I couldn’t be bothered to go the dedicated build server so I just remoted to it. After setting up the build agent and the build definitions I tried to do a test build but all I got is the following error:

“TF209009: The account NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE is not authorized to communicate with Team Foundation Serverhttp://server:8080/. Verify that the account is a member of the Build Services security group for the appropriate team project on the Team Foundation Server and that the account's password has not expired”

 Googling TF209009 only produced 9 results, and none of them had a solution, so I decided to write this post.

 The problem is that the build agent runs as a windows service, and probably because I remoted to the machine the service would be run as “NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE” which of course is not authorized to access the server, and is not a licensed user in TFS (more info).

To fix this you need to go to the windows services and change the “Visual Studio Team Foundation Build” service to log on as the domain user that is authorized to access the server and is in all the correct user groups in the TFS.