From time to time, for whatever reasons, Jet suddenly thinks that a server with which it was doing Internet or indirect synchs is invalid, so it does not even try to synchronize with it. I have posted a lot of other info on various things you can do to handle this situation, such as The Care and Feeding of "Empty Full Replicas" and Using "replica farms" in Jet for indirect/direct replication but these are mainly preventative measures to try and keep the original problem from occurring, not ways to solve the problem once you have it. The problem is that a single direct synch would have you back to normal, but a direct synch can be dangerous and might corrupt the file (which is usually the reason people moved to indirect or Internet synchronization in the first place!).

If your remote replicas are full replicas, then one way you can inform those remote replicas of the fact that the server is alive and well (without having to move big files around or synch directly across a dial up connection) is to create a brand new empty partial replica from code with a simple

CurrentDb.MakeReplica "partial.mdb", "", 1 

OpenDatabase("partial.mdb", True).PopulatePartial CurrentDb.Name 

You now have an empty replica that has all the info about available replicas. Use either the TSI Synchronizer's MoveReplica command or Replication Manager's "Move Replica" menu functionality to put this small database on the user's machine, and then they can synch the remote replica with it to get the latest info on the server and its farm. You can then MoveReplica it back up to the server and use it if this sort of thing ever happens again.

The bottom line is that knowledge is power. By giving the remote replicas knowledge that the rumors of the server's demise were not true, you can add a lot of power to your replicated solution.

UPDATE 4/7/2000: David Fenton has written a very cool GUI (graphical user interface) that will create these empty partial replicas, suitable for solving the problems mentioned in this article. It lets you browse to choose the parent, name the partial, compact the created replica, make sure that the source database is replicable and has no errors/conflicts, and more. If you are interested, you can download the tool from here.

Problems with this site? Please contact the webmaster@trigeminal.com
with your comments, questions, or suggestions.