BizTalk Admin Console Fails with DTC Failures

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Relevant Environment Information:

Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 (32-bit)

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 (32-bit)

Symptoms: While doing a BizTalk Health Check with a customer, we encountered errors with the Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC) while using the BizTalk 2006 R2 Admin Console. I, unfortunately don’t have the exact error any longer, but it mentioned something about unable to contact the DTC service which is a very serious issue because BizTalk is heavily reliant on the DTC service. The odd thing is that the BizTalk services continued to operate normally, so only the admin console was effected by this.

Looking at the event logs, I found a few errors similar to this one:

Category: ENTSSO
Type: Warning
Source: Enterprise Single Sign-On
Event ID: 10532
Description: "Failed to retrieve master secrets. Verify that the master secret server name is correct and that it is available.
Secret Server Name: <Computer>
Error Code: 0x800706BF, The remote procedure call failed and did not execute."

This error is also a very scary error to get because just like the DTC service, BizTalk is heavily reliant on the Enterprise Single Sign-On service (ENTSSO).

We called up Microsoft Customer Support Services (CSS) to help us with this. Yes, I am a Microsoft field support professional, but I don’t know everything. ;-)

CSS had us restart the DTC service on the BizTalk Servers, then restart the Microsoft ENTSSO Master Secret Server. After that, it was working again. No errors in the BizTalk Admin Console.

Cause: The DTC service was restarted and the ENTSSO Master Secret service lost contact with it.

Solution: Restart the DTC service, the restart the ENTSSO Master Secret Service.

Lesson Learned: Always restart the ENTSSO Master Secret Service after restarting the DTC service.

More Information: The Enterprise SSO Master Secret key is extremely important. If your ENTSSO service becomes corrupted, then you lose everything. There are certainly *many* more reasons why the ENTSSO Master Secret Service may fail, so always make sure you backup the Master Secret key using SSOManage.exe, backup the key to some place you can get to and where it is not on the local machine, and finally, ensure you remember the restore password.

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