Security risk of enabling MSDTC

The reason Dell (and Sony etc.) disable Intel-VT and AMD-V is that they cannot support it. Enabling the feature would mean they would have to provide support on it, which the simply cannot do, due to insufficient knowledge at the supportdesk, mainly.

That is, at least, how Sony formulated it.

I tried prying the reason from Sony support guys and that is the only thing they would give me. I finally was able to patch my BIOS and enable VT myself, though.

As for the rest, stuff like Bluepill are not exactly mainstream. And as far as I know - and I work with virtualization stuff a lot - there is no downside to enabling it. If there is though, I would really like to know about it...

RPC uses random high ports, which are in all likelihood being blocked by any firewall that happens to be between the devices.

It's possible to lock it down to a set range of ports so that this range can be allowed through the firewall; this KB article covers the process.

In my last unpleasant DTC-through-a-firewall experience, aside from needing to hardcode the port range, I recall needing to make some other arcane reg hacks, as well as relax a number of the security settings in the Component Services Management tool against my better judgement. Hopefully you have better luck; start with the ports and see how it goes!

(P.S., why the heck do applications still use and microsoft still support DTC?)