Connection issue with Jenkins slave on Windows Azure

I am also setting up Jenkins CI in Azure and was getting this same problem. Specifically, I would see this error in the Jenkins slave error log:

SEVERE: I/O error in channel channeljava.net.SocketException: Connection reset

To work around it, you need to increase the frequency with which the slave pings the master. You can do this by adding the Dhudson.slaves.ChannelPinger.pingInterval system property to your master jenkins.xml file.

I modified it to ping every 2 minutes and the channel was able to mantain the connection without dropping it. XML looks like this:

<arguments>  -Xrs -Xmx256m -Dhudson.slaves.ChannelPinger.pingInterval=2   -Dhudson.lifecycle=hudson.lifecycle.WindowsServiceLifecycle   -jar "%BASE%\jenkins.war"   --httpPort=8080</arguments>

For more information you can see the related ticket.

If you have a newer version of Jenkins (ours is 1.584), you can go to the nodes configure page for the slave, click on the Advanced button under Launch Method, and add -Dhudson.slaves.ChannelPinger.pingInterval=2 to the JVM Options field.

That did the trick for us!