Unable to begin a distributed transaction

Question

I\'m trying to run SQL against a linked server, but I get the errors below :

BEGIN DISTRIBUTED TRANSACTION
SELECT TOP 1 * FROM Sessions


OLE DB provider &quo         


        

Answer 1

OK, so services are started, there is an ethernet path between them, name resolution works, linked servers work, and you disabled transaction authentication.

My gut says firewall issue, but a few things come to mind...

1. Are the machines in the same domain? (yeah, shouldn't matter with disabled authentication)
2. Are firewalls running on the the machines? DTC can be a bit of pain for firewalls as it uses a range of ports, see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306843 For the time being, I would disable firewalls for the sake of identifying the problem
3. What does DTC ping say? http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=2868
4. What account is the SQL Service running as ?