New transaction cannot enlist in specified transaction coordinator

Seems like my day was dedicated to this error message! Ran into it while setting up some tests and we just couldn't get to the bottom of it. Here are some of the more interesting things I discovered while looking into this issue.

For starters there is this very useful KB article which guides you through various DTC related issues and how to identify them. The tool mentioned (DTCPing) was useful in ironing out some other issues, but not the main problem. The fascinating part was that the tool almost passed - we got an innocuous looking error followed by a message of the RPC test being a success. Here is what the error message looked like:

Error(0x2AFC) at nameping.cpp @62
-->gethostbyaddr
-->183(Cannot create a file when that file already exists.)

Interestingly, a colleague pointed me to an article dedicated to this very innocent looking error message. Wonders never seize! J

Anyway – this too did not get us all the way. After more head banging (and trying stunts like attempting to uninstall/reinstall MSDTC (which in retrospect might not have been too good an idea, since it can seriously screw up the system)) what finally solved the issue was opening up of more ports through Component Services à My Computer Properties à Default Protocols à Connection Oriented TCP/IP à Properties.

P.S. - One tool which would be useful in Windows - something that showed what ports were open/closed and were being used by which applications/services etc. Maybe there is tool out there which actually does that – Anyone?

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