Solved: Replication agent instance windows service doesn't start anymore

[Former Member]

Some time ago we solved an ugly issue about the fact that one of our replication agent instances wasn't able to start anymore and today I decided to share this finding with the community.

At some point in time the configured replication agent service did not succeed to start anymore, it just immediately stops with a "cryptic" error message like "the value <false> is not known". It was very tough to find the underlying reason for it (because the instance wasn't changed few weeks) and it took us quite a few hours to figure out what was goining on.

The whole issue was caused by trailing blanks behind values within the resource file and/or within the replication agent configuration file.

It seems that the module which parses the configuration values is not doing a proper "trim"-command, and this causes an issue to the replication agent instance which runs as a Windows service (we have to replication MS SQL Server databases).

Everybody, please be aware of adding new configuration values to the replication agent resource file or configuration file - please ensure that there are no trailing blank characters after values like true" or "false".

Best regards and enjoy your time!