Intermittant Connection Errors

I have a Merge-Pull subscription setup between two SQL 2005 databases. While watching the status messages display for the subscription, I am constantly seeing the following message being displayed:

"The merge process could not connect to the Publisher '{server}:{database}'. Check to ensure that the server is running."

It will display for anywhere between 15 seconds to a few minutes, then it will display the standard "Waiting 60 seconds..." message which is what I'm used to seeing when all is working well.

There doesn't seem to be any network issues that I can identify. I ran a quick script to run ping continuously against the publisher server and verified that the server was constantly "pingable", even when the above message was displayed (which, by the way, was being displayed by using SSMS while connected to the publisher).

Does anyone know what would cause this message to appear all the time - for extended amounts of time, with occasional glimpses of a non-error status?

It's a wild guess but failing to login / authenticate ?|||I thought of that but am not sure that it applies. The reason being that I can leave the subscription/synchronization status window open in SSMS and it will toggle back and forth (seemingly randomly over time) between the message I mentioned above and some type of valid message.|||What about Timeouts (Connection or Query)? I have seen similar issues in Web Sync. If the amount of data changed since the last sync operation then I have experienced Timeouts while the sync is initialized. Not exactly as you describe but another parameter worth checking.

Rab
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I'm not sure what the issue was but it seems to have resolved itself - at least for the time being. If it happens again, I'll be looking for more answers :-)

Thanks for everyone's help.

|||I have this problem as well. It works sometimes and then fails with this error message which leads me to believe it isn't a login problem. I'm still new to replication so I could be wrong, but I think once I get this message, replication is broken and requires someone to intervene to reinitialize. Has anyone figured out what is going on?