I set up a transactional, pull publisher, distributor and subscriber last
week on a development system and all worked fine. Then, I did the same set
up on our production system and it is not working. When this was started on
Thursday night the distributor would not start. I was not here Friday so my
boss stopped replication and I did not see the error messages. I set up a
new replication subscriber last night and it looks like it did not
synchronize though I saw transactions going from the publisher to
distributor, but nothing going from the distributor.
I look in the log file viewer and see no error messages. My guess is that
the distributor is not running but I don't know how to see if it is.
I thought that I did everything the same on the production set up that I did
on development, that worked.

Nick - can you run the distribution agent from EM/SSMS and then post up the
messages you get. Also, what version of sql server are you using and are you
using updatable subscribers - it's not entirely clear from the description.
If updatable subscribers, is data being prevented from flowing in either
direction?
Just a simple check would be to see if the tables are there on the
subscriber (assuming they weren't there originally!) - this means
initalization has worked and the distribution agent has worked at least once.
If SQL Server 2005 you can use a trace flag to test the throughput is working.
HTH,

Paul,
Thanks for the quick response.
I don't know how to "run distribution from SSMS and then post up the
messages". I'm new to all this.

My publisher is SS 2000; the distributor and subscriber are 2005. I am not
doing updatable subscribers.

I starting from a subscriber database that is a previous backup of the
publisher. I look to see if the record counts, dates, etc. have changed as
they should and they have not.

How do I use this trace flag?
thanks - nick

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