Azure VM suddenly unavailable - windows

I've had an Azure VM running fine for years but all of a sudden I can't access it anymore. Not through RDP nor through http.
Nothing changed on my side and Microsoft only gives phone support for 230€/month. What to do?

Maybe it has corrupted? The only two things I can think of are: try connecting over Powershell to see if it will respond; You could pull it down from storage and launch the console locally to see what is going on? Azure as you may know doesn't offer a console access. The only other option is to rebuild it assuming you have backups etc.

Ok, finally put the money down and got it up again. The advice on the phone was to upgrade from A2 to A3 processor/memory specs. This would force the VM to go to another machine, ruling out problems with the hardware / NIC. This worked but was quite expensive. They will get back to me next week with the exact problem report.

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Where integration bots are stored?

Where does OSX Server store integration bots? Or is it my local Xcode who stores them? Server screwed my setup again, but this time I'm no longer able to see my bots.
Just want to express my deep frustration with Xcode CI:
OSX Server (or whatever it's called) is one of a kind piece of software, giving me incredible headaches lately with its' laginness, bugginess and poor performance. I think over the past week I experienced all possible errors Server has to offer:
"internal error updating bot" (please try again later);
"error reading service configuration" (or similar wording) - requires Xcode reset; continue to occur randomly again and again with no reasons;
"Xcode version is not supported" - only reboot seems to convince server to use Xcode which was already used previously
Randomly, fail integrations because "device is not connected", given that I test desktop application for OSX...
Finally, after yet another episode of screwing my setup, I no longer can see my bots on the server - they vanished. well done Server.
The bots and integrations are stored on the server.
The directory should look something like /Users/<xcode_server_tester_user_name>/Library/Caches/XCSBuilder/Bots
(OSX-Server 5.3 (16S4123), XCode 8.3.2 (8E2002))
I hate to say this but I found restarting the machine is a good way to resolve frustration No. 1 and 2.
device is not connected error often happens right after OS, OSX-Server or XCode is upgraded.
Usually reselecting devices from the XCode UI works for me.
Although sometimes it may require repeating multiple times and waiting for a long time for the device list to load.
On your OSX Server machine, deleting the simulator and re-adding it via Xcode->Devices sometimes helps too.
Another way is to delete all simulators from the linked Xcode on OSX Server machine and only keep the ones you want to test your project on. Config the bot to use All iOS Devices and Simulators.
Even though Xcode Server now runs as a specific user, the configuration files are kept in /Library/Developer/XcodeServer. You can also hit the Xcode Server API to get information about your bots.
In a Couchbase db.
I don't know how to access the contents though.
Enter this in Safari on your server
http://localhost:10355/_utils/

Can't access microsoft.com and skype.com web site after installing VS2013 Preview

Recently i installed Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 Preview Ultimate on Windows 7. Everything went smoothly except now i can't access www.microsoft.com and www.skype.com anymore. Tried latest IE10 and FireFox, both show blank page when accessing the above mentioned web sites. Firefox in its left bottom corner shows that it is waiting for ajax.aspnetcdn.com.
I'd really like not to reinstall OS on my machine, so i'd appreciate any idea how to fix this. For myself i tried to stop Firewall service and disable MS Security Essentials runtime protection, neither helped.
PS: I can access www.microsoft.com and www.skype.com from another machine in the same local network
UPDATE: i am using tfs.visulstudio.com as my TFS server and it opens fine if i am not signed in. But once i am trying to log in it opens blank, like browser is waiting for something (the same as for microsoft.com and skype.com). Something related to live ID?
Don't think this is the website to post this kind of question but try uninstalling VS2013 preview because you think that's causing the problem. Search in Google for people getting similar problem. I also don't think it is VS2013 because I can't think of anyway of how VS2013 would somehow disable you from going to a certain website. Make sure the sites weren't down at the time or if you're having something kind of Internet server issues.
skype is owned by microsoft, so you can't enter both microsoft pages. This could be related with some kind of ISP (Internet Service Provider) and not with VS2013, or you can try rebooting your router. Last thing i would do is traceroute both address and see where they fall.
I wanted to write this as a comment but I don't have enough reputation yet. Anyway, obviously trying to uninstall the program and trying again would be a good start as already mentioned, but you should also look inside your hosts file for any weird redirections some virus of malware might have set up. It's located at "C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc" and you can open this inside notepad (might require notepad to be run as an administrator). Check to see if skype.com or microsoft.com are in there and are pointing to a different IP address. If they are you can just remove them and save the file (might require a restart to take effect). If still no luck you should try a livecd of a linux distro to make sure the problem is definitely inside your windows somewhere.
Let us know how it goes.

CacheInstaller.exe has stopped working

I am having below mentioned issue when I am running Asp.Net MVC 2 project on windows Azure emulator (dev environment)
I have installed Windows Azure SDK for .NET - October 2012 version and I am using cache feature on my system.
With above error Below one is also comming.
How to get rid of this ?
Maybe I have an stupid solution, but that works with me.
When I begin to recieve the message "CacheInstaller.exe has stopped working", I do the following:
1) Stop the execution.
2) Go to the Role I'm using in the Azure project and open the corresponding Properties page.
3) Go to the "Caching" section and there I uncheck the "Enable Caching" checkbox. After that I checked again.
4) Save*, Run de application and never the warning appear again.
Is weird because nothing should change if you uncheck and check it again an option without save in the middle, but in this case when you do that the file changes (I can see it in the red icon that said something change there, :P)
I hope this helps. Cheers.
Do you have any error messages in the event log that may give more hint.
It could be an issue with missing dlls, do you have the windows server appFabric installed as well on this machine, which may be leading to a conflict with the dlls?
A procmon log might help you see what file paths its looking for.
"http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645"
I banged my head against the wall on this one as well. I finally figured out the problem after digging deep into the crash-dump logs located within: C:\Users\{YOU}\AppData\Local\dftmp\Resources\{GUID}\directory\DiagnosticStore\AzureCaching\
AzureCaching does not allow UNC paths.
As my primary .net dev is from a vm, my documents/projects drive is mapped to my native drive located at: \\psf\Home\Documents\... Once I moved the project to the vm c:/ drive, CacheInstaller worked as intended.
Might as well post my experience as I was unable to locate anything on this specific problem.
I found today that if my system time was more than about 10 minutes wrong then CacheInstaller.exe bailed out on starting the emulator.
That includes the combination of system time and timezone being wrong, presumably as it results in an inability to calculate the correct UTC time at which Azure operates. Fixing the system clock resolved the issue in my case.

Team Foundation services are not available from server - The remote name could not be resolved

We are working with Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010. We did not have any problems for about half a year, but:
Since a couple of days we get the following error: Team Foundation services are not available from server (...) The remote name could not be resolved; (...)
The problem occurs randomly (we are unable - yet - to pinpoint the conditions on which it occurs) and persists until we restart Visual Studio. The problem occurs about 8 times per day per developer.
Because we seem not to get past this problem and we cannot find anybody writing about this specific combination (the error and the 'remote name' part), I thought it wise to ask you guys about it ;) . Could anyone please help?
This is a client, server or infrastructure related problem on network level. The DNS entry for your TFS server cannot be resolved correctly at times for host dfz-vm223.
Suggestions for troubleshooting:
On some developer systems, replace the hostname dfz-vm223 by the ip-address of the TFS server. If the problem stop occuring there the DNS system is instable.
Setup a continuous ping stream (ping -t dfz-vmm223 from command window) and see if the host system is pingable in case you have TFS server problems.
Just found out what the problem was: the problem is proxy related. When we disable our proxy, the problem is gone. It appears our proxy and TFS are troublesome together. If anyone experiences the same problem and you are working with a proxy server, I would suggest you try disabling the proxy too.
I had the same problem, although I'm using VS2012 and a WAN connection to TFS.
I solved the problem by flushing the DNS cache.
To flush the DNS cache, start a command prompt with admin rights: ipconfig /flushdns
You need to do this in all the computers where the problem occurs.
I know this is old, but I had this problem sometimes when I ran Fiddler.
Sometimes Fiddler would crash or not clean up properly and the whole machine would get into some weird state where not even reboots were helping. The solution to it usually is to start Fiddler again, turn off any interceptors/collecting traffic and shut it down again.
Some of my co-workers and I had this problem as well. Out of about 25 developers, most never got this error. But three of us got it pretty consistently. The symptoms are identical, but we are using Visual Studio 2013 almost exclusively. In this version of Visual Studio, the error is preceded by the code: TF400324.
We found eventually that the three of us had all installed Productivity Power Tools 2013. And the developers that were not affected by this error had not installed it. Most had not heard of it. This used to be a very popular extension, so I have always installed it as I set up my system since about 2007. But apparently, in its modern incarnation in Visual Studio 2013, perhaps in combination with some quirk in our network or something, it can cause this problem. We have each uninstalled it, and have not gotten this error since. (It's been several months now.)
If you have this extension installed, you probably already know about it, because you probably installed it yourself. You probably started using it years ago, and it became a habit to add to each new installation. You will find that today, the default installation of Visual Studio actually includes most of its features already. To uninstall, go to Tools --> Extensions and Updates... Then click on Productivity Power Tools 2013, and click Uninstall.
Hade the same issue. For whatever reason the windows DNS Client service on my PC wasn't running. Changing it from Disabled to Automatic solved this problem for me.
Too long for comments:
First off, as #kroonwijk stated, this is an infrastructure issue. Your DNS queries are either timing out or the DNS server is not responding at certain times.
In a comment you mentioned a change over from regular machines to laptops for your entire dev team. If I had to make a bet I'd say that the DNS configuration on the laptops is not the same as what you had on the other machines.
You need to take this up with your infrastructure people. If you still have access to the older machines boot one of them up and compare the IP configuration. If not, get them to fix the problem. The DNS resolution problem could be any one of a number of factors. For example, the new machines could be pointing to an incorrect DNS server that has network issues or their might be some incompatibility between how Win7 makes DNS requests and your DNS server.
I have also experienced this problem and it doesn't always have to do with name resolution.
If you add an entry to your %systemroot%/system32/drivers/etc/hosts file for your TFS server, it removes any dependance on your name resolution servers.
If you are still experiencing the problem, then it has to do with either visual studio or one of the VS Extensions that you are running. There may be a memory leak somewhere. Disable all your Extensions using the extension manager, restart VS, and see if you still experience the problem.

How do I know why my Azure instance doesn't start?

I deployed my service package into Windows Azure. Management Portal has been showing "waiting for the role instance to start" for 30 minutes already so I assume something is wrong.
I know that there's Azure Diagnostics, but is there some easier way to find what's going on in my instance - like some console displaying some detailed output or something?
In these cases, it is probably the most expedient to simply RDP into the box and see what is going on. Event logs, hitting the site, etc., from inside the machine usually gives you a pretty good idea. If you have Intellitrace (Visual Studio Ultimate), you can also enable that and suck down the logs to see what is happening. That works very well also.
#dunnry The problem is that you can't open a RDP session to the server if your Azure Role is not running, so you don't know anything what is going on.
Most of the times there is something wrong in your Azure Configuration files. Try removing parts and redeploy afterwards. Pay triple attention to your ConnectionStrings. Make sure that the ServiceDefinition ConfigurationSettings are all defined in the ServiceConfiguration ConfigurationSettings File.
What we basically do is to deploy on a nightly build basis. We can check our ChangeSets of the day before after an instance is not reaching the running state.
If the Azure Diagnostics doesn't tell you anything then I don't think so - no. Somewhat annoyingly, one thing that frequently causes problems is Azure Diagnostics initialization - e.g. if the diagnostics connection string is wrong.
If the role instances start but the app has problems then the remote desktop might help.
If all else fails, try Azure support - it's still free right now.

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