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Help Using Component Services/MTS and DCOM DLL Servers 1

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Swart

Programmer
Mar 16, 2001
1
US
I've seen a lot of info regarding ActiveX EXE DCOM servers and using DCOMCNFG, but very little regarding leveraging your DCOM server with COM+/MTS. As a VB/C++ COM+/DLL programmer for the last few years I have been using message queueing as a pipe, which is a serious pain. I have just recently looked at DCOM as a convienient pipe for nth-tier architectures and was wondering if anyone could shed a little light into the differences between using ActiveX EXE DCOM servers and DCOMCNFG or using ActiveX DLL DCOM servers and Component Services(CS)/MTS/COM+.

It seems to me that the DLL way is the way to go as you can leverage other MTS/COM+ functionality, e.g. transactions, object pooling, etc. But COM+ defined applications don't seem to have the same default system and object security definition as exe DCOM server in DCOMCNFG. Do the DCOMCNFG default system setting still apply to DCOM DLL servers defined in CS/COM+ as CS/COM+ does not seem to have the same levels of definable security, e.g. system vrs. object?

Also, do both exe and dll DCOM server types utilize dllhosts.exe for server side processing? And does the COM+ application Start/Shut Down menu options actually work or do you need to kill dllhosts to actually refresh with new settings!!??

Based on all this I can run a COM+/MTS based DLL DCOM server and have it work all right. But how do I accept application calls from users my DCOM server is unable to identify/authenticate, e.g. Other non-trusted NT domains or even worse, NetWare users, yuck. I run into the well documented problem of Permission Denied: run time error 70, however, all discussions I find regarding this details using DCOMCNFG and ActiveX EXE DCOM servers. And, to top it off, all the discussion I have read do not seem to indicate that any DCOM server can be opened up to the world. I realize VS.Net and SOAP are the answer to this but we can't go there yet!

Anyway in CS/COM+ I do set my Authorization Level to "None" and Immpersenation to "Anonymous" but nothing seems to let the unknown users access my server. It seems that there is still a system level security blocking me, and in DCOMCNFG the system setting don't account for "the world", which would seem to open up access to anyone who can see my server!!!???.......

Any feedback regarding anyportion of this post is appreciatted.
 
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