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Use Catlight without VPN

We have a question regarding access to catlight from an external network. The connection between catlight and tfs works perfectly from our internal network. From the external network, however, a vpn connection is absolutely necessary so that catlight can establish a connection to tfs. Without the vpn connection, the error message appears that no connection can be established. This is somewhat tedious for our developers, as they would only have to establish a VPN connection for Catlight
Since our TFS is also accessible from outside without vpn, we wonder if this would also be possible for catlight?

nothing is blocked by the network, we have checked this

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Hi, we have received a similar ticket from your company about this issue before. Although we didn't find the root cause for this issue, the most likely problem is that authentication to TFS works differently when you connect to it directly, or via a proxy that exposes it to the internet.

Here are some workarounds you can try:

  1. Check if restarting the CatLight app after connecting/disconnecting to the VPN fixes the issue.
  2. Provide credentials explicitly when connecting to TFS in CatLight (instead of using default authentication with current Windows user)
  3. Try using a personal access token instead of a username and password. You can go to TFS web app, click on the user logo -> security-> personal access tokens. Create a new one with full access, and try using it instead of a password when connecting to TFS. This should avoid NTLM/Active Directory authentication path.
  4. If you have an HTTP proxy that forwards authentication requests correctly, you can configure it in Edit menu->settings->proxy. Restart the app after configuration, and then all requests should be forwarded through it.
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