Replication via FTP

[digs dhande]

Hello all,

I'm setting merge replication of MS SQL Server 2000 to use FTP
throughfirewall. The publisher and distributor are protected with a
proxying machine,and a subscriber is in the Internet.

I have two questions about that,
1) do I need to enable something else than FTP to pass through the
firewall?

2) I'm afraid some problems may appear if I'll try upload changes from
the subscriber to the publisher. The problem is that the subscriber
knows only IP address of proxy host, not of the machine behind the host
(it may have fake
IP,
by the way). Is it possible to set the firewall to reroute packets to
the
publisher? Say, I'll set the pair of ports for "SQL designated" FTP
other than
20/21.

I'll be grateful even if somebody gives me a link to info about those
issues.
There's too little of info in MS documentation.
Kindest regards,

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[George Li [MS]]

1. The key issue to configure SQL Server replication through firewall is:
how to allow incoming traffic from a external Winsock client to a internal
Winsock server that is listening on TCP port 1433 (This is for default
instance, you may need to change it for named instance). So we also need to
enable incoming connection to port 1433 for your default instance.

2. We need to create a server alias for the internal SQL Serve. Please
refer to the following steps for detailed information.

Suppose our configuration is follows:

1. Internal SQL Server (publisher and distributor) at 209.58.170.10.
2. Proxy Server. Internal IP address 209.58.170.20, external IP address
157.57.25.30.
3. SQL Servers at external network.

We can follow these steps to configure the anonymous pull transactional
replication:

1. Configure the internal SQL Server:

-- Launch the Server Network Utility; make sure we have enabled the TCP/IP
net lib. Select the Enable WinSock proxy, type the external IP address of
the Proxy Server and port 1433.

-- Create the following Wspcfg.ini file on the internal SQL Server computer
and place it in the same folder as the Sqlservr.exe file:

[sqlservr]
ServerBindTCPPorts=1433
Persistent=1
KillOldSession=1

-- Install the Winsock Proxy Client.

-- Restart the SQL Server.

2. Configure the Proxy Server to allow inbound connection to TCP port 1433.

3. Configure the External SQL Server.

-- Launch the Client Network Utility, create a server alias for the
internal SQL Serve: Click the Alias tab, Click Add, type the server name of
the internal SQL Server into the Server alias box, select TCP/IP as the
network lib and enter the external IP address of the Proxy server into the
Server name box.

-- Register the server alias in the Enterprise Manager created before.

4. We can manually copy the initial snapshot file to the subscriber; we can
also use FTP to deliver the snapshot files. To use FTP:

-- Setting the snapshot folder location of the publisher: from the
Enterprise Manager, right click the Replication Monitor, click Distributor
Properties, click the Publishers tab, click the ?button near the publisher,
and change the snapshot folder to \\ProxyServerName\Repldata\ftp.

-- Create a directory at the Proxy Server, c:\Repldata\ftp, and share this
folder.

-- Configure the FTP server at the Proxy Server, set its home directory to
c:\Repldata\ftp.

For more detail information about how to configure proxy server for SQL
Server and how to configure replication through the firewall, please refer
to the attached document at the article at
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnsql7/html
/proxyrep.asp.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Best Regards,

George Li

Microsoft Support