The process could not connect to Subscriber

[peteo]

I setup a merge publication that replicates one table from
a publisher to a subscriber. I have a domain user named
domain_user in both the publisher and the subscriber.
Although, the domains for these two users are different:
(ie. office1 and officermt). My startup account for the
server and server agent for the SqlServer in my remote
domain (officermt, the publisher) is domain_user and this
is not true for the subscriber. The subscriber starts on a
domain account other than the domain_user for both
services. I setup an sql server user in both Sql Servers
(duser with the password the same as the name). The
process connects to the publisher without a hitch and the
replication agent connects impersonating the Sql Server
agent account. The merge agent connection to the
subscriber uses SqlServer authentication and the user is
duser with password same as name. Upon start of the merge
agent and after connection to the publisher happens, I get
the error: The process could not connect to Subscriber
XXX. I tried impersonating the Sql Server agent account
but it did not work. I use pptp to connect the systems
with both systems been SQL Server 2000 SP2. I have done
this before with other remote sites but somehow this one
is failing. Can anybody shed some light on how to resolve
this problem? Thank you in advance for any help.

[peteo]

So far I was able to determine that the problem relates to the fact that the server is not listed on the sysservers table in the master database. This entry is required to be able to connect remotely. One curious thing was that this is the only merge replication that I have setup that creation of the publication and the running of the initial snapshot failed. The failure was listed as the inability to create the instance of SQl OLEDB object. I solved this problem by applying MDAC 2.7 to the system. I know that the users that I am using to connect to the subscriber have rights in the server. The initial failure of the SQL OLEDB instance and the lack of an entry (that the initial connection is suppose to create in the table) are the only things different from any other merge replications I have done. Any suggestions?

[skhanal]

Do you have trust setup between two domains?

Try to access a share in publisher while logged in to the subscriber as the subscriber account to verify that security is setup properly.