Ok, let me stop and take a deep breath for a second.  My Team System story started Friday and it isn't finished yet.

A couple of friends and myself decided to get together this weekend and try to get team system up and running.  In preparation for this I decided that my laptop needed to be re-paved.  I only had one partition on my hard drive and I wanted to make some room for a dual-boot Linux partition.  I wanted to do this before team system because I didn't want to play with team system and then just have to wipe it to make room for Linux.  The re-paving went fine but I didn't rap up until 3am on Friday night. 

So, Saturday morning I went at it again prepping for Team system on my newly re-paved rig.  I started by reading this post. I was going to just use VPC, but this game me a good excuse to download and try Microsoft Virtual Server 2005.  I'll post another article about virtual server later, but for now let's just say it's some of the coolest stuff I've seen in a while.

With Virtual Server installed I followed Michael Lehman's instructions on setting up the 3 virtual servers.  I only have 1GB of RAM on my laptop but I kept with the suggested RAM settings (128 App, 128 DB, 256 Client).  This was where I noticed my first small snag.  When installing Yukon with 128MB I was paging like crazy.  After the install was over I bumped it up to 256.

Ok, so the database server installed pretty easily so I moved on to the App server.  This took a very long time.  I don't have a DVD burner yet, so I was stuck with trying to capture the ISO image.  This is a little strange when you are dealing with virtual server.  To do this I set the app server to use the real nic (not the internal network), mapped a network drive to my “real” computer and then mounted the ISO using Virtual CD.  This was causing me all sorts of problems.  I tracked it down to the network.  At first I thought that Virtual Server had some networking issues.  My network would be available one second, and then drop out the next.  I finally figured out it was because I was mapping the virtual nic to my wireless card.  This is not a good idea. As soon as I switched to my wired nic things became much more stable. 

Once I finished with all the pre-reqs. I was excited to start installing the VSTF app server.  The first try I received an error:

 installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package.  The error code is 26205

I also received this message with error code 26204.  So after I yelled at the wall for a bit I started looking around on the web for info.  I found this blog entry first. It talked about having domain naming problems.  That wasn't the issue. Next I found this blog entry. Ok, so that looked promising, I was having a sql problem.  The first bullet that made me think was the one about making sure the setup account has admin access on the DB server.  DOH!  I always forget that when you join a computer to a domain it doesn't switch to log into that domain.  With WinXP the drop down is hidden under the advanced button so I realized I was installing this as the local admin, not the domain admin. 

I switched to the domain account and tried again... same error.  Man this was frustrating.  So after screaming at the wall some more, I re-read that blog post.  The next bullet that made me think was the one about having a clean database tier. Hmm, I looked at my database and sure enough, there were left over databases already on the server from previous installation attempts.  I deleted the databases that I thought were for Team System and ran the install again.  Same errors.

Ugh... at this point I was very frustrated.  It was about 3am and I was tired too.  I knew that the issue was database related, but I wasn't sure what was wrong.  Finally I figured it out.  It turns out that only two of the databases that Team System installs are labeled with Team System like names:

 VSTEAMSCC
 VSTEAMSCCAdmin

The problem is there are several other databases that are installed as part of team system that I mistakenly thought were default Yukon databases.  So I deleted the rest of them and ran the install.

EUREKA, I now had an app server.  For anyone else that has this issue, here's a list of the databases that Team System installs:

 BisDB
 BisDWDB
 CurrituckDB
 ELeadDB
 psshared
 VSTEAMSCC
 VSTEAMSCCAdmin

Ok... so I now had an app server and database server.  It was 4am at this point and I couldn't go on.  I gave up and decided to work on the client on Sunday (today).  Again, I'm having problems... I've installed the app server up to the point of Visual Studio.  When I install Visual Studio I receive and error that I haven't debugged yet.  I am guessing that it is an issue with the ISO capturing software that I'm using.  I still hope to find a different ISO capturer to try to see if that's the issue.  The error that I receive says something about a file being corrupt. 

Boy, this is a lot of work.  I started Friday night, and it's now Sunday night and I'm not done yet.  I sure hope Team System is worth it.