Great Plains Guy

I recently had a fight/set up transactional replication (with updating subscribers!) on my databases.

Here's some of the crazy stuff I had to do:

1) Go into the bowels of my DCOM security setup and open everything up (more details to come).

2) Run msdtc -install / hack the registry / run msdtc -reinstall.

3) Create some funky looking user in my SQL db so that trusted authentication would work for connecting to the distributor.

4) Enable MSDTC on my servers (since its disabled by default!), which involves doing an install of the MSDTC windows component (makes me wonder why they didn't just call in installing MSDTC versus "enabling" it?)

5) Had to create a linked server specifically named with my Server Name

6) Had to go into Windows Firewall and add port 135 and the MSDTC program as exceptions, even though Windows Firewall wasn't running!

7) Used tool DTCPing to tell me I wasn't crazy. But it reported everything was successfull, even though I couldn't get a distributed transaction to run, so I am crazy! :-)


Whew. OK. This is just a first post to vent my frustrations with setting up replication. I promise to come back and tidy this up with more details, screen shots, and KB links!