Sybase.com

Required Software

M-Business
Windows OS (This is what was tested)
DOS Command Window

Assumption

This problem and solution was tested on Windows Vista with M-Business Anywhere 6.7

Sample scenario:
"My system was working fine, and now the sync service will not start. This happened after we changed a configuration in the sync.conf file."

Figure 1 m-Business Anywhere Sync Service Failed to Start

Explanation:

The user in this case has changed some settings in the configuration file of the sync server. Instead of running the sync server as a service, we need to run it manually and determine why it is failing to start. To do that, we need to do the following:

On Windows OS click on Start > Run
In the Run box type cmd and click on Run
From the command prompt navigate to the bin location of the default installation of m-Business Anywhere server ( i.e C:\M-BusinessAnywhereServer )
Execute the following command:
The -X in the command line makes the sync server run in single threaded mode. This is useful when you want to debug why sync server is not starting as a windows service or unix daemon. When run like this, agd.exe will display any errors in the console before exiting, thus helping troubleshoot the cause of the problem.

Example:
C:\M-BusinessAnywhereServer\bin>agd -d C:\M-BusinessAnywhereServer -f C:\M-BusinessAnywhereServer\conf\sync.conf -X

Syntax error on line 193 of c:/m-businessanywhereserver/conf/sync.conf:
Cannot load C:\M-BusinessAnywhereServer/ASA/win32/dblib8.dlll into server:

As we can see, there is a syntax error in the sync.conf file at line 193. Now all you need to do is open the sync.conf in your favorite editor and find out what went wrong. In our test case, we added extra “L” to the dblib8.dll.

Original Line before the fix:
LoadFile "C:\M-BusinessAnywhereServer/ASA/win32/dblib8.dlll"

After the fix: LoadFile "C:\M-BusinessAnywhereServer/ASA/win32/dblib8.dll"

Now the service will run successfully.