BizTalk: In the remote connection dialog, is there any way to force TCP/IP transport rather than Named Pipes?

Question

I am trying to connect to a biztalk instance over the network, and not being all that successful. The SQL server with the biztalk databases on it has named pipes disabled. When I try to connect to the server that has biztalk installed, it gives a named pipes error. When I try to connect to the database server, it just times out and gives an error that covers virtually every scenario under the sun (basically it can't connect and it doesn't know why)

If I try to connect with SQL Server Management Studio it works. If I try to make a dsn, it works. If I try to go through biztalk, it dies. If I try to go through biztalk with the tcp: prefix, it dies. If I force named pipes on the other two, it dies.

Is there any way from the Connect to existing group dialog to force using TCP/IP as the transport?

Answer 1

To force tcp , try "tcp:servername" (or "tcp:servername\instancename,port") This can be done without setting an alias or default protocol with SQL tools

There are alternatives to why you may get the error though:

• The named pipes error can be misleading, It usually just means "can't find server"
• firewalls etc are blocking access to either the SQL instance
• ... or SQL listener port 1434 thats enumerates instance/ports

Answer 2

do you get any error messages in system or application log?

you may need to check some of the shapes - ports etc as there may be

http://www.biztalkserverguide.com/2008/02/04/biztalk-server-throwing-named-pipes-error-40-could-not-open-a-connection-to-sql-server/

declared a variable called btsConnString (string), this varable was not set to the connection string, it was blank ( by mistake), things were working as expected without issue. On the Stage As the btsConnString wasn’t assigned a connection string, it was throwing the error

Also look at MSDTC issues for connection DTC Test is here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/293799 and if you can install on both servers use DTCPing

also look at theseThe majority of Microsoft SQL Server issues that affect Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 fall into one of the following categories:

Answer 3

I believe I had something similar fairly recently - BizTalk would try to connect to the SQL box using named pipes for some obscure reason, which would time out. We've using the registry (HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\Client\SuperSocketNetLib) to force it to try TCP first (and last, and we haven't specified any other protocol) and it seemed to do the trick.

See details here