SMS: Adjusting the Sender's Retry Delay Can Cause Errors on Retry (278357)

CAUSE

This issue occurs because the default sender heartbeat time-out period is five minutes. If the sender thread waits for more than the heartbeat time-out period, it acts as if the connection to the remote server has been permanently lost.

RESOLUTION

To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Systems Management Server version 2.0. For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

288239 SMS: How to Obtain the Latest Systems Management Server 2.0 Service Pack

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article. This problem was first corrected in Systems Management Server 2.0 Service Pack 4.

MORE INFORMATION

The Retry Delay value is available on the Advanced tab in Standard Sender properties. Use this value to extend the time that the sender waits after a network error has occurred before trying to resend data to another SMS site server.

In typical operation, if a transient network error occurs while a package file is being transmitted from one site to another, the sender recovers automatically and begins resending the package file after waiting one minute (the default setting).

If the sender is configured to wait more than five minutes before attempting to resend the package file, the sender acts as if the connection has been lost and does not perform the retry attempt. When this occurs, the following entries appear in the Sender.log file:

Heartbeat is expired.
Can't re-establish the connection.

Later, when the sender creates another sending thread, the following error may be reported in the Sender.log file:

Cannot create/open the remote file \\server\SMS_SITE\2_4O7PRI.PCK, Win32 error = 32.