Just wanted to document an issue I found while trying to have a remote site connect and store data to a central MS SQL DB over VPN. The issue I saw was that the Store and Forward engine was unable to create all the tables in the database. Only sqlth_drv, sce, scinfo and te got created. But sqlth_partitions and the corresponding _data_x_year_month tables were never getting created. The log files were riddled with errors and warnings such as:
TagHistoryDatasourceSink - There is a problem checking the tag history database tables during initialization of the store and forward engine which could prevent tag history data from being forwarded properly. Trying again in 60 seconds.
and DatasourceForwardTransaction - Error forwarding data
Turns out that I was making this connection to the database over an IPSec VPN connection. After hours of struggling…I decided to change to SSL VPN connection. After that, all warnings and errors are gone. I don’t know the inner workings of IPSec or SSL VPN, but something was blocking specific create table instructions (if that is even possible).
The other issue was that my Remote Tag Provider setup on the main server was unable to pull the tags from the remote site (connection via Gateway Network). Again, once I changed the VPN connection type from IPSec to SLL, problem solved.
Hope this helps someone else. Or if anyone knows why SSL worked and IPSec didn’t, I’m all ears.