Could not contact the SSO server

I started getting my hands dirty with BizTalk development after a few months of working as an architect (in the drawing pictures and writing documentation sense).  It’s good to be back!  Unfortunately, it also means that I get the fun of setting up my BizTalk configurations again.

While trying to load some settings into SSO through the Deployment Framework (http://biztalkdeployment.codeplex.com), I got this beauty of an exception:

Could not contact the SSO server ‘(local)’. Check that SSO is configured and that the SSO service is running on that server.
 (RPC: 0x800706BA: The RPC server is unavailable.)

The same error also showed up when I tried to run the SSO Admin utility as well.  My first reaction was to check my BizTalk configuration to make sure that everything looked good.  I saw the pretty “Green Check” next to SSO in the configuration list, so I guessed (correctly) that it had nothing to do with my BizTalk configuration.

But the fact that I was using the server ‘local’, did make me wonder.  I know this works ok with SQL Server, but using the shortcut (local) to refer to a database server is problematic with SSO.   To set things straight, I just had to run the SSOManage command-line utility and set the server to the local machine name instead of using the term “(local)” and that fixed the problem.

So, here’s the command-line fix:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Enterprise Single Sign-On>ssomanage -server <machineName>


or


C:\Program Files\Common Files\Enterprise Single Sign-On>ssomanage -serverall <machineName>


You can then run the same utility with the -showserver command-line parameter to make sure that it took. Below is an image of the results on my machine.