"Failed to register this test agent" message when installing Agent in VS2010 B2

Question

Hi there,

I looked through the forum and didn't see this as a prior question, so...  I have installed the test controller software on one machine (XP SP2 x86) and when I go to install the agent on another (XP SP2 x86) I receive this message:

"Failed to register this test agent with the test controller.  Possible reasons could be you do not have the right permissions to connect to the test controller <machine>:6901, or a firewall is blocking the connection.  To fix this problem, verify that you are a local administrator on the test controller machine and that the Windows Firewall Settings on the test controller machine has "File and Printer Sharing" exception".

We are using McAfee Desktop Firewall rather than windows firewall, but I have turned off the firewall on both ends, and verified that my user account is an administrator on both machines. 

Any help would be greatly assisted

Answer 1

Hello Matthew,


I believe both your agent and controller machines are Windows XP. If one of your machines is Vista/2k8/Windows 7, then the problem described in the Beta2 readme sec. 2.4.12.1 could affect you.

Having the configuration logs would help us probe this further. So if you can file a bug and attach the log file, that will be great. Visit this page to file a bug:  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=151484

This failure is caused when the test agent cannot communicate with the controller to register the agent. The common reasons/troubleshooting steps are (as mentioned in the error message):
1. Permissions: As you have validated that the user you are running the agent configuration tool as is an Administrator on the controller machine, we can rule this out.

2. Firewall exception on both machines and File/Printer Sharing exception on controller: We have tested only with Windows firewall, but since you mention that you have turned off your firewall, this might not be the cause for this failure. Did you get a warning in the configuration tool saying firewall is turned off?

3. Network connectivity: Can you please run telnet <ControllerMachineName> 6901 (6901 is the default controller port) on the test agent machine and see if you are able to successfully connect to the port on which controller is listening?

Answer 2

If you are in a Domain Joined scenario it is likely that a machine reboot would clear up any latency in propagation of credentials.  Since you are configuring with the currently active user some credential updates may not occur short of a machine reboot.

If you are in a Workgroup scenario it is likely that the ForceGuest policy is enabled on the agent and controller machines (since this OS enables ForceGuest by default).  ForceGuest will ignore the shadow accounts you've established on each machine and only allow authentication as the guest account user.  To disable ForceGuest you can toggle the value of the forceguest value from 1 to 0 in the registry at HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa.