merge replication - can't create snapshot - timeout - sql server 2008

Question

I have a SQL Server 2008 database, and I need a mergereplication because i want to sync with mobile devices afterwards.

So I created a replication but when it comes to start the snapshotagent, the agent tries to start for about 20 minutes and then it shows the message

The replication agent has not logged a progress message in 10 minutes. This might indicate an unresponsive agent or high system activity. Verify that records are being replicated to the destination and that connections to the Subscriber, Publisher, and Distributor are still active.

There aren't any other errormessages, neither in the snapshot-agent-status-window nor in the agent-log-window.

I don't have the administrator of the domain, but the local administrator and a domainuser with admin-privilegs. Both have all rights to database, are in the access-list of the replication.

The server agent runs on the local administrator-account and there are 3 MergeReplications on the server, working

The job runs also under the local administrator.

Thank you for your help, Karl

Answer 1

So it works again...

Maybe someone else has got the same issue one day, so i post the solution here:

I researched on the server and found out, the sql server service is running under a local user. The reason for this is, that there were problems with the backupsystem, used by our customers and so they changed it years ago.

Because of the local user account a 15404-Error occures.

Knowing, that i mustn't use domain-accounts, I also solved the initial problem with my snapshot-agent. I searched for hours (nearly days ;) ) and it was just this little change:

When the Replication is created, the job is created too. The job has three steps. The Job-owner is the local-admin, also for the server-agent-service. But the second step of my job (replictionsnapshot) has one setting: run as. And by default this isn't the job-owner but the user running the creation, in my case my domain-account.

Now, that I set it to the local-administrator as well everything works fine again.

Thanks, Karl

Answer 2

I had the same issue, And the below fixed the issue. The replication agent was timing out after 10 minutes and changing the heartbeat from 10 to 30 minutes solved the issue,

Run the below command

exec sp_changedistributor_property @property = 'heartbeat_interval', @value = 30;

and then restart the sql agent on the subscriber to continue syncing.