"Communication with the underlying transaction manager has failed" error message

Question

A client of our has recently upgraded a ASP.NET 1.1 web application to ASP.NET that uses COM+ transaction processing and received the following exception while trying to process a transaction:

Exception Type: System.Transactions.TransactionManagerCommunicationException
Message: Communication with the underlying transaction manager has failed.

Inner Exception Type: System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException ErrorCode: -2147467259
Message: Error HRESULT E_FAIL has been returned from a call to a COM component.

Here are the following settings on MSDTC Security Settings:

-- Network DTC Access
-- Allow Inbound
-- Allow Outbound
-- Incoming Caller Authenication Required

A Windows XP SP3 workstation is trying to establish a connection to a Windows Server 2003 machine.

Has anyone else experienced this error and know how to resolve it.

Answer 1

You'll need to have network DTC access enabled on both your XP workstation and your windows 2003 machine. Also, if your application is only published internally, you can turn off incoming caller authentication and set it to "no authentication".

Answer 2

Add C:\Windows\msdtc.exe to the firewall exceptions on both the firewall and server. I spent ages monkeying around opening specific port numbers and ranges to no avail before I did this.