Monday, July 22, 2013

SCCM 2012 Database Replication “Link Failed”

Okay, I guess sometimes there’s a real meaning of “patch testing” before throwing it into the production or production-like environments. Microsoft patches have been mostly unproblematic but every now and then, they tend to show their effective nature. I had one similar case this past Friday when I installed “bunch of patches” in my SCCM 2012 SP1 Secondary sites and didn't bother to examine further and went off for the weekend. I know, you are probably wondering, duh! don’t you test your patches or confirm once installed, right? Well, sometimes you will lose the focus of “what to test” and want to deal with it when real problems starts and besides, this was a production-like environment (test/dev) that I could easily troubleshoot if things go south.

Come Monday morning, as part of my routine, I check the Monitoring area of the console and under Database Replication, I found the secondary sites links are failing to replicate from the parent. I look at the replication status and the last time it successfully synchronized was right before I installed and rebooted the sites for patching. Running the Replication Link Analyzer was little help as it didn't show anything major other than check the rcmctrl.log (Replication Configuration Monitor) file for related issues.