I am trying to set up a merge replication using web synchronization between a publishing SQL Server 2012 standard and subscribing SQL Server 2012 Express. After following the instructions provided at Technet, I am stuck on this:
Source: Merge Process(Web Sync Server)
Number: -2147200985
Message: The subscription to publication 'MyMergePublication' has expired or does not exist.
I already verified that SSL certification are good, that I can browse to the publishing machine's URL https:\\mycomputer\replisapi.dll and get the expected output. I already verified that snapshot was set up and I took a giant hammer & use an administrator account to run the pool identity which is really bad security-wise but wanted to validate that it was not security that was tripping me up.
To further the mystery, when I try and fail to sync, the publisher acknowledges that a new subscriber has been registered, but it cannot get the snapshot at all and thus subscriber database is still empty.
On the replication monitor, there are no failed synchronization history, or any errors; all it has to say is that the subscriber is uninitialized, and no more.
Turning up the verbosity of the merge agent, I saw some sql being executed and tried replicating the sql and i found this was failing with same error:
{call sys.sp_MSgetreplicainfo(?,?,?,?,?,?,?,90)}
I called it with only the 3 mandatory parameters supplied and it would fail. That is despite the prior call sp_helpmergepublication does return a row for that publication. Oddly, the content of sp_helpmergepublication does not match what I configured for the subscription (e.g. it says web url is null when viewing the properties correctly shows the web url being set). Not sure that is significant.
The content of sp_MSgetreplicainfo contains a call to another system sprocs that I cannot run for some reason (says not found) so I'm not sure what is actually going on here.
Any clues would be greatly appreciated.