Follow-up on our Restore Attempt(s)

Two weeks ago today I left the building frustrated with Microsoft because of poor documentation. You can see my rant here.

I'm still a bit miffed that the "How to restore..." document was (and still is as of this writing) wrong, but I'm feeling better that they have graciously apologized to me. And the fact that with the help of Support, we're up and running in the restored test environment. Being I'll most likely forget, here are the steps we had to do to get this test restore environment up and running.

First support walked through the steps 1 - 14 of "Restore and Test SQL Report Server, Reporting Services, and Default Reports" BEFORE we did "Rename the Team Foundation Data-Tier Server and Activate the Team Foundation Application-Tier Server" AND "Move User and Service Accounts" section. Why? I'm not sure if I understood the reasoning.

Second, support did the following steps on the App Tier and Data Tier once I handed over support with Easy Assist.

1) App Tier: Before they ran RenameDT, they changed the ReportSever AppPool identity from NetworkService to the TFSReports account.
2) App Tier: They ran RSKeyMgmt.exe –d which deleted all encrypted data on the server
3) App Tier: They ran RSKeyMgmt.exe –r on the GUID from the initial install of TFS on this new hardware. Somehow this GUID gets re-added?
4) Data Tier: Opened up the tbl_database table in the TfsIntegration database and changed all the ‘servername’ values to the new Data Tier.
5) Data Tier: Opened the tbl_service_interface in the TfsIntegration database and changed ReportsService and BaseReportsURL to have the new App Tier name.
6) In Reporting Services Configuration, they made sure that the TFSReports account was used instead of a built in account.

After they did all this, the RenameDT worked. Like my first point, I'm not sure I understood why they did all this and if it was all really needed.

Third, after "Rename the Team Foundation Data-Tier Server and Activate the Team Foundation Application-Tier Server" we did the "Move User and Service Accounts" section. All this worked just fine.

Fourth, this wasn't really related to the restore per say, but we did have to give the AppTier\Users group Read, List, Read & Execute on the c:\Program Files directory. Without this, the only users that could log in where those who were members of the AppTier\Administrators group. I'm not sure if this is correct, or why the TFS install didn't set it up for us? When I compared this test restore hardware with our current PROD hardware, the current PROD hardware was configured with AppTier\Users have that access to c:\Program Files so we just mimicked the behavior and it all worked. UPDATE: We also had to give AppTier\Users Full Control access to %Program Files%\Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team System Web Access\Cache.

Fifth, we finished steps 15 - 29 of "Restore and Test SQL Report Server, Reporting Services, and Default Reports". This all worked fine.

Sixth, and lastly, we changed the Instance ID so that we didn't have the same Instance ID for both our current PROD hardware and our test restore hardware. See this full forum for how to do this.

After all this, we currently have a test copy of our current PROD system restored so we can play around with it.