VSTS issues connecting to GHE (HTTP 403)

Question

We haven't changed anything in VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services) and are suddenly getting HTTP 403 errors in our "Get Sources" build step when trying to pull code from GHE (Github enterprise).

2018-01-10T01:45:07.5198700Z remote: Your account is suspended. Please check with your installation administrator. 2018-01-10T01:45:07.5294550Z fatal: unable to access 'https://********:********@ghe-us.ourcompany.com/ourteam/ourservice.git/': The requested URL returned error: 403 2018-01-10T01:45:07.8066190Z ##[error]Git fetch failed with exit code: 128 2018-01-10T01:45:07.8361190Z ##[section]Finishing: Get Sources`

We're using a Github PAT (without username) to authenticate. Someone tried creating a new PAT and that worked.

Why has this stopped working and why did a new PAT fix it?

Answer 1

There was a change done a little bit ago which requires accounts reside within a security group be allowed in the front door of the GHE appliance. They've added that account to the group within //IDWeb so replication may take up to 4 hours to fully propagate.

This is likely because the "user" was technically an email-enabled service account.