Understanding DCOM problems

TeamWork relies heavily on the DCOM protocol for communications between its client applications and the TeamWork application server as described in Understanding TeamWork interprocess communication. Unfortunately, due to the abuse of this protocol by hackers in recent years, Microsoft has steadily increased the default security restrictions on DCOM in subsequent Windows versions, making the legitimate use of the protocol more difficult.

Improper configuration of DCOM can result in a variety of TeamWork error messages. When trying to connect to a TeamWork application server, a client computer may receive one of the following error messages:

• “Remote calls are not allowed for this process”
• “RPC Server not available”
• “Cannot create instance of AMDocumentRepository”
• “Access denied”

The following topics describe common solutions to these error messages.