Issues using tf command-line on Linux

Question

I started this question in another thread: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/TFService/thread/3a3e6cd8-2fc6-4e6a-85c4-dd26d65654cd

But it seems more appropriate for a new question.  The problem is, we keep getting errors from the tf command-line on Linux.  It was suggested that our Java version was unsupported, and there were several other variables to explore so we made some changes and ran some experiments.

Now, we’ve tried just about everything we can think of, and we continue to have troubles.  We’ve tried various combinations of the following configurations, none of which produce any better results:

• CentOS5 vs RHEL5
• TEE 2010 vs 2012
• JRE: gij 1.4.2 vs Oracle JRE 6 vs Oracle JRE 7
• Glibc: 2.5
• Hardware: physical i7-920 vs Rackspace VM vs Hyper-V VM

Our TFS 2010 server is currently hosted in Rackspace (we’d like to move to MS-hosted TFS, but that’s a different story).   The collection is rather large, contains some binary files of up to 100MB in size, and contains perhaps 25000 source files of various kinds.  A newly-fetched workspace is several GB.  A checkout of a branch under Windows takes about 1 or 2 hours and completes without issue.

On linux, we can set up a workspace, user credentials, etc, and start the initial “get”.  Inevitably, this runs for some time, fetches some files (usually many, sometimes only a few), and then crashes with a NullPointerException (although, we’ve seen other exceptions as well).  Often, running tf repeatedly will eventually get all of the files, but it sometimes leaves temp files around or misgets a file or two, or has improper file permissions.

What would you recommend as far as remedying our problems?  Is there somewhere we can turn for hands-on problem resolution?

Meanwhile, if there is anything else we should try, please do make suggestions for additional experiments.

---

John Lilley Chief Architect RedPoint Global Inc.

Answer 1

Hi John,

Thank you for your post.

According to your description of the issue, hope you help collection provide following information to narrow down the issue:
1. Are you using hosted team foundation service(https://tfs.visualstudio.com/en-us/), or on-premises TFS 2010?
2. What's the of your Java?
3. Can you post us the detail error message?
4. What do you want to do with tf command line?

Regards,

---

Lily Wu
MSDN Community Support | Feedback to us
Develop and promote your apps in Windows Store
Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they help and unmark them if they provide no help.

Answer 2

Lily,

Thanks for responding.

1. We are hosted in rackspace (which is equivalent to on-premises, we have a VPN nailed up to the server).

2. As mentioned above, we've tried several, including the built-in gij, Oracle JRE6 and Oracle JRE7.

3. I will get the exact message, but I believe it is "NullPointerException"

4. I want to get the entire workspace.  And I want to check out files, change them, and check them back in.

---

John Lilley Chief Architect RedPoint Global Inc.

Answer 3

The exact message:

tf get –recursive –all

...

Replacing autosave1.ipp
An error occurred: java.lang.NullPointerException

---

John Lilley Chief Architect RedPoint Global Inc.

Answer 4

Hi,

I am trying to involve someone to further look at this issue. There might be some time delay. Appreciate your patience.

Would you please email me([e-mail]) your email address, for not miss your email, please include this case URL information in the mail.

Regards,

---

Lily Wu
MSDN Community Support | Feedback to us
Develop and promote your apps in Windows Store
Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they help and unmark them if they provide no help.

Answer 5

We did discover one issue with the tf command-line that has a workaround.  Namely, it is apparently possible upon migration of a TFS repsitory to another location, for some items to report an "invalid MIME type" upon get.  Under VS, the error is reported.  The tf command-line simply crashes.  We will continnue to investigate this angle, however I don't believe that this will get at the core issue.

---

John Lilley Chief Architect RedPoint Global Inc.

Answer 6

Perhaps we have a solution!  It appears that there were two things going wrong that were fixed for different reasons, and this was confusing:

1) Some combination of older TEE, unsupported Java, and/or Windows server 2003 domain control was causing various issues in our older TFS server.  This has plagued us for some time.

2) Upon moving the TFS repository to a new server something about the migration caused "bad MIME type" issues, which we know how to fix once they are seen.  However, we didn't see them execpt under TEE/linux where we were acticely setting up new workspaces. 

So some combination of newer TEE, supported Java, and Windows server 2008 domain control seems to have fixed issue (1). 

Deleting and re-adding the violating items in Source Code Control fixe the MIME issue. 

We are now verifying under various conditions.

---

John Lilley Chief Architect RedPoint Global Inc.