SQL Merge Replication using web synchronization

Replication
1

Hi all,

Thanks for looking at this for me. Here is the scenario...

I have a fleet of trucks and I have a publication for each truck so I have a total of 54 publications on a server. I have a few trucks that have stopped synchronizing for reasons that I can't comprehend. The sql version is 2008 r2 sp2 the client versions are running SQL Server express 2008 r2 sp2. I setup the subscription on the client and attempt to sync through windows sync center (running windows 8). When I do this, it errors with "The merge process was unable to deliver the snapshot to the subscriber. If using web synchronization, the merge process may have been unable to create or write to the message file. When troubleshooting, restart the synchronization with verbose history logging."

I don't believe I can troubleshoot that way with SQL Express. I have a bunch of other subscriptions that work perfectly fine. I have deleted the subscription, recreated it. Didn't work. I deleted the publication on the server and recreated it, didn't work. I rebuilt the client from scratch and tried again... didn't work. I cannot figure out what the problem is. It looks as though on the client that all the data is put into the tables, etc. it just fails. Everything that I've googled has come up with nothing, everything seems to be setup correctly.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

2

"Used to work, stopped working" then the stock answer would be "what changed at the time that they stopped working". Windows Update? SQL Service Pack Patch? Change to COMMs / Firewall?

My money would be on the COMMs layer failing to communicate, for some reason. I don't know whether it is possible to do a sort of PING test on SQL Replication comms to check that each end can see [in a "SQL Sense"] the other? If not maybe make a Linked Server and see if that fails on those machines, but works OK on ones that don't have the problem.

I have no experience of this type of replication, so just thinking outloud and quite possibly barking up the wrong tree, so apologies if this is no help