This week we had great trouble installing and configuring our MOSS Pre-production environment, after lots and lots of problems, we realized that the machines were (apparently) disk-cloned without properly executing sysprep so there were lots of problems regarding DTC and security permissions due to duplicated SIDs...

So I've realized I wrote a couple of posts two years ago about how to troubleshoot MSDTC issues, the funny point is that the problem I troubleshoot then was that disk cloning was done exactly like today and the client was also the same... "Those Who Forget History Are Doomed to Repeat It"

BTW, we have to completely reinstall the machines, so be careful with cloned machines in real world, always use sysprep and check the machines SID is re-generated before installing anything!!!

So here is the first original post:

MSDTC Issues & excellent blog found

Today we installed in a development environment and had some problems, it seemed that DTC didn't work, the code seemed ok, because on our PC worked fine, but when installed on the dev environment it stalled.

I googled about it and found two really useful utilities: DTCPing and DTCTester, and also this amazing blog http://blogs.msdn.com/florinlazar/

It is full of DTC and System.Transaction info, techniques and troubleshooting, it's a must have.

BTW, the problem with my transactions was that both machines involved in the transaction where clones (two virtual machines) and had the DTC identifier the same, so the DTC did not work when communicating them.

I found it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/florinlazar/archive/2005/09/16/469064.aspx

And here is the second post:

The transaction has already been implicitly or explicitly committed or aborted (0x8004D00E)

Sometimes I find that problem with working with System.Transactions.TransactionScope, it has to do with the promoting of the local transaction to distributed transaction and the DTC communication between the servers.

I usually find it when working on my W2003 laptop against the customer db server, which is usually a W2000 server. When you deploy the solution to the windows 2000 production server it works all right.

So you must see this thread: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=871791&SiteID=1 

It seems that the problem is that the DTC in 2003 requires authentication by default and W2000 does not provide authentication (the need of that authentication is younger that w2000 I think), then you have to setup DTC for not requiring authentication.

When working on XP SP2 you can get the same error because of the firewall settings, in that post also talks about how to fix it.