Project Server 2013 Issue - TF294003: Cannot access the following PWA instance

When you try to call the binding command to map a Team Project Collection in Team Foundation Server 2012 to a Project Server 2013 Web Instance you can get a “TF294003” error.

Figure: TF294003: Cannot access the following PWA instance

You get:

TF294003: Cannot access the following PWA instance: http://win-eo45n4fnsoc/PWA  Project Server returned this error: “The request failed with HTTP status 401: Unauthorized.”. Verify that the PWA instance exists, and that the necessary permissions have been granted to the service account for the team project collection to access the PWA

Applies to

• Project Server 2013
• Team Foundation Server 2012
• Project Server Extensions for Team Foundation Server

Findings

If you have followed all of the directions in Assign Permissions to Support Integration of Project Server and Team Foundation Server  but but you are still having issues you should check:

• TF294003: Cannot access the following PWA instance 

After consulting with that and many other sites I went spelunking on the servers and following all of the leads in the aforementioned sites. As it turns out I installed Team Foundation Server 2012 with the default options and this resulted in TFS running under the “NT AuthorityLocal Service” which does not have permission to SharePoint.

I was concentrating so much on making sure that the “BUILTINAdministrator” account, that I am using for everything else, has permission that I missed the account that TFS was using.

Solution

In this case it was simple to change the service account for Team Foundation Server to be the “BUILTINAdministrator” account instead of the “NT AuthorityLocal Service”.

Figure: Changing the TFS Account is easy

As I change the account TFS will nicely go off and update everything else for me. Including the Farm Administrators group.

Figure: Updating the TFS Service Account everywhere

This got me to thinking that is I changes it back to “NT AuthorityLocal Service” it would do the same, and sure enough…

Figure: Local Service is now a Farm Administrator

I can almost hear generations of SharePoint administrator rolling over in their graves at this, but this is a demo box that I am using to prove out the technology and not a production setup . You should always use a different Domain Account for every individual service in both TFS and SharePoint if it were…

Figure: The mapping of Collection to Project Server 2013 Instance now works

This was a simple solution to a confusing problem…