Category: Windows 2008

Database, Programming, Software, SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008, Windows 2003, Windows 2008, Windows 7

Quick and Easy Windows Shortcuts to Common Server Applications

Justin Cooney

The other day I was working on a Windows 2003 SP2 server that was no longer displaying anything other than the Windows desktop. I could not bring up the start menu or even see the bottom menu bar.  This naturally was a problem because I wanted to set up a new Web site on the server.

In my experience this problem with Windows is most likely caused by Windows running for too long without a restart, so the standard fix is typically to restart the entire computer.

However, restarting the server was not an option since at that time it was being actively used by other developers for development and testing. So rather than cause trouble for everyone, I decided to look into setting up desktop shortcuts to the programs I wanted to work with.

Continue reading “Quick and Easy Windows Shortcuts to Common Server Applications” →

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IIS, Programming, Web Development, Web Server, Windows 2008

McAfee ePO Conflicts with IIS (and how to Resolve the Conflict)

Justin Cooney

It appears that McAfee’s ePO system causes conflicts with Web servers when it is hosted on the same machine as for example a Web server like IIS.

Why is this?

I experienced this conflict on a Windows Server 2008 R2 server that was set up with  IIS 7 and McAfee’s ePO system.

Apparently McAfee’s ePO system runs on Apache behind the scenes and requires port 443 to be available. This causes a conflict with Web servers such as IIS which also need port 443, so either one or the other breaks if they are both up and running on the same server.

The fix for this is actually quite simple. Port 443 is not really necessary for the functioning of McAfee’s ePO system, so it can be manually commented out in the listen line of McAfee’s httpd.conf file. Although the ePO GUI does seem to provide an option to disable port 443 communications under configuration->server settings->ports, this does not actually work.

Continue reading “McAfee ePO Conflicts with IIS (and how to Resolve the Conflict)” →

Programming, SQL, SQL Server 2008, Windows 2003, Windows 2008

Troubleshooting MSDTC: The transaction manager has disabled its support for remote/network transactions

Justin Cooney

While rolling out a large stored procedure to our test servers today Luvy and I got a cryptic seeming server communications error message indicating there is a problem with the MSDTC settings.

The transaction manager has disabled its support for remote/network transactions

At first we thought this had something to do with the linked server we were using. However after testing out the various server option settings and checking for similar errors on Google it became clear that the error was due to configuration issues on the servers housing our SQL server databases.

One of the servers is Windows 2008 and the other is Windows 2003 R2, so finding the locations of the settings was different between the two machines.

The first set of steps was that we had to check the running services. On both machines this was the same:

  1. Click Start -> Administrative Tools -> Services
  2. In the Services popup look for the service called ‘Distributed Transaction Coordinator’ and make sure it is running

Secondly we had to check the MSDTC options on the computer. Continue reading “Troubleshooting MSDTC: The transaction manager has disabled its support for remote/network transactions” →