Why do I get error H202 when trying to open quickbooks in multi user mode?

Solution 1:

I gleaned some info from a guy that used WireShark to track down his problem with error H202.

Apparently if you open the file as \\fileserver.mydomain.com\fileshare\quickbooks.qbw, Quickbooks may have problems reaching the database server to switch to multi-user mode.

However, if you open the file as \\fileserver\fileshare\quickbooks.qbw, Quickbooks should work just fine. i.e. don't use the fully qualified domain name, use the NETBIOS name.

In our case this meant editing the lmhosts.sam file located at c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc to include the line

10.1.1.19 FILESERVER #PRE

(where 10.1.1.19 is the ip of the fileserver your QB file is on and FILESERVER is the NETBIOS name of the server)

You can also see that this is your problem from Quickbooks point of view if you specify the full name in the "Change hosting server" field on the diagnostic tool.

Solution 2:

Michael's answer above drove me to a resolution for us as well. We were getting H202 error in multi-user environment unless we had a user logged on to the company file at the host server first and then the clients could log on fine. We are/were using a CNAME instead of the actual hostname of the host server. So we had a friendly CNAME of quickbooks so they could map as \quickbooks\\companyfile, but with this we experienced the errors mentioned. So I just switched to use the actual hostname of the computer and this seems to resolve this issue. Very strange that it works fine without error using the CNAME if someone is logged on at the host server first though.