How to get DTC working on Amazon Web Services.

Melissa  Amanna 02/02/2011

Recently I had been working on a case where the customer was making use of DTC with Amazon Web Services.

Amazon Web Services provide online Services to other websites or client application. They make use of DHCP and hence the IP address keeps on changing.

 In the case that I was working on, the customer was getting a DTC error:

OLE DB provider xxxx for linked server xxxx returned message " Cannot start more transactions on this session." Msg 7395, Level 16, State 2, Line 2. Unable to start a nested transaction for OLE DB provider xxxx for linked server xxxx. A nested transaction was required because the XACT_ABORT option was set to OFF.

Customer was able to ping by the FQDN name but not by the host name. It used to resolve to some other IP address.

Hence, in such scenarios, we need to add the IP address and the host name in the hosts file. This file is present under the “C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc” folder. We need to edit the file and make in the entries for the IP address and the host name.

You can find out the hostname of the machine by opening a command prompt and simply type “hostname”.

By doing the above changes and enabling XACT_ABORT resolved the issue. 

Written by : Melissa Amanna, IGTSC

Reviewed by :  Chirag Pavecha, IGTSC