The other day I was troubleshooting an issue with log shipping where the copy and restore jobs were failing. Here is an example of the error for the copy job, which was also similar to the restore job.
2010-06-29 09:41:52.80 *** Error: Could not retrieve copy settings for secondary ID '[removed]'.(Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.LogShipping) *** 2010-06-29 09:41:52.81 *** Error: The specified agent_id BECBBCC0-6867-4398-BD96-830D62D88558 or agent_type 1 do not form a valid pair for log shipping monitoring processing.(.Net SqlClient Data Provider) ***
While it is not completely clear, this means that the copy job was not able to login to the instance and query the log shipping tables in MSDB. When I was first trying to gain access to the instance I had noticed that it was configured a bit strange. Basically they had a default instance and a named instance. The default instance was used as the secondary for log shipping while the named instance was being used for dev work. Well that part isn’t so strange… However they had an alias configured to redirect the server name to the named instance. So the log shipping jobs thought it was connecting to the default instance, it was actually connecting to the named instance. To work around this I just had to add the port number to the jobs as in the example below.
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Binn\sqllogship.exe" -Copy BECBBCC0-6867-4398-BD96-830D62D88558 -server SERVER01,1433
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