Came across an interesting problem today. When trying to create a new Receive Port, it kept on saying access denied when creating a new port.

It seems that when you wish to create a new receive, or send location you have to be part of the SSO Administrators group.

Hope this helps!

Whilst trying to deploy BizTalk Assemblies to a seperate SQL Server running Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1, an error kept on appearing from my Windows XP SP2 computer.

An error occurred while enlisting in a distributed transaction.

I tried solving this using the support articles on MS however to no success!

The way i solved this problem was as follows:

Windows Server 2003 SP1 and Windows XP SP2

Go into Administrative Tools -> Component Services -> Right Click "My Computer" and go to Properties.

Click on MSDTC, Security Configuration

Make sure that the the following is selected.

Restart both client and server.

Voila, all works fine!

A new version is out!

Download it from here

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=12CB3C1A-15D6-4585-B385-BEFD1319F825&displaylang=en

Every time we rebooted our servers, we noticed that the SAN volumes were always offline. This is really annoying when hosting Virtual Servers, File shares and databases (yes SQL server doesnt like this one bit!).

Without any documentation to install and help us with configuring a new volume we decided that we should create new dynamic disks rather than basic disks (as a SAN can be seen as dynamic)

Note to self: DO NOT do this with the iSCSI initator. This is not supported or recommended by Microsoft after reading some obscure newsgroup posting.

Once we copied all data from drives, deleted and created a basic disk, rebooted, the volumes came up all OK.

So in summary, always create basic disks when using the iSCSI initiator.

I am starting to get into Microsoft's BizTalk Server 2004 now, its a fascinating product with so much potential.

Ever wondered how to backup your SSO Master Secret and get rid of all those annoying event log errors?

Navigate to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Enterprise Single Sign-On

type in ssoconfig -backup <filename>  

e.g. ssoconfig -backup mastersecret.bak

This will ask you for a password, confirmation and a password reminder.

Voila, its all done and a clean event log!

Well everyone says what a pain it is to find a house, and now i believe them!

After looking for the last month or so, we are no closer to finding that right house, oh well looks like more Saturday's driving around looking at the ever increasing housing market.

Also why do real estate agents like the 2-2:45 time slot so much? Sort of limits potential buyers!

Well I am still trying to figure out what all this hype is about blogging! After being hounded (Woof!) i better start one and maintain it!

More to come...