Tridion 2013 SP1 publishing fails with following error "Transport service failed to transport"

Question

Publishing is failing with following error "Transport service failed to transport. Unable to establish transport to destination.Unable to retrieve destination metadata". When I check the cd_core log file on CMS server I am getting following errors.

2016-04-12 10:53:23,803 DEBUG SSHFTPTransportConnector - SSHFTPConnector, retrieving file: meta.xml from destinationPath: /apps/webapps/website/temp 2016-04-12 10:53:23,804 DEBUG TransportPoolManager - Connector is registered for reuse: SSHFTP[Port[22], Host[10.230.68.210], Location[/apps/webapps/website/temp], UserName[geapp], PrivateKey[d:\Licenses\xyz.pem]] available: 3 2016-04-12 10:53:23,804 ERROR TransportService - Unable to establish transport to destination. com.tridion.transport.TransportException: Unable to retrieve destination metadata at com.tridion.transport.DestinationController.(DestinationController.java:116) ~[cd_transport.jar:na] at com.tridion.transport.DestinationControllerFactory.getDestinationController(DestinationControllerFactory.java:41) ~[cd_transport.jar:na] at com.tridion.transport.model.transaction.context.TransactionProcessor.createOrLoadTransaction(TransactionProcessor.java:134) ~[cd_transport.jar:na] at com.tridion.transport.model.transaction.context.TransactionProcessor.(TransactionProcessor.java:48) ~[cd_transport.jar:na] at com.tridion.transport.TransportService.handleTransaction(TransportService.java:253) ~[cd_transport.jar:na] Caused by: com.tridion.transport.TransportException: IO error retrieving FileContents from currentDestinationPath: /apps/webapps/website/temp at com.tridion.transport.connection.connectors.SSHFTPTransportConnector.retrieveFileIfPresent(SSHFTPTransportConnector.java:249) ~[cd_transport.jar:na] at com.tridion.transport.connection.connectors.TransportPoolConnector.retrieveFileIfPresent(TransportPoolConnector.java:80) ~[cd_transport.jar:na] at com.tridion.transport.workers.EndpointMetaWorker.getMetadata(EndpointMetaWorker.java:54) ~[cd_transport.jar:na] at com.tridion.transport.workers.EndpointMetaWorker.getMetadata(EndpointMetaWorker.java:36) ~[cd_transport.jar:na] at com.tridion.transport.DestinationController.(DestinationController.java:108) ~[cd_transport.jar:na] ... 4 common frames omitted Caused by: java.io.FileNotFoundException: /apps/webapps/website/temp could not be found at com.sshtools.j2ssh.SftpClient.cd(Unknown Source) ~[j2ssh.jar:na] at com.tridion.transport.connection.connectors.SSHFTPTransportConnector.retrieveFileIfPresent(SSHFTPTransportConnector.java:233) ~[cd_transport.jar:na] ... 8 common frames omitted

When this error occurs I restart all the CMS services and publishing works fine for 2-3 days and after that again the same problem occurs. Our CMS is running on Windows server and jsp websites are running on linux servers. Can somebody please suggest how can I fix this issue?

Answer 1

As per the error message Unable to establish transport to destination. That means your connection between CMS server and Destination server is disconnected that's why it stopped working suddenly.

Please check the publication target details and verify whether you can connect to destination from the server where the transport service is running.

Restarting the Transport/Publisher services will not work. Try to figure out why that connection break down and fix that.

Answer 2

It appears from the error message that you're publishing over Secure FTP (SFTP).

You may want to check - using a standard FTP client (such as Filezilla) - that you can connect to the FTP location using the connection details and credentials configured in the Publishing Target. You will want to check that this user has permissions to create and delete files in the FTP destination folder also.

Given that the problems are intermittent, you may be having problems with connections not closing correctly - causing your FTP server to run out of available connections (until restarted). In this case, I'd suggest that you look at the logs for your FTP server for anything suspicious.

Other possible causes may include infrastructure problems such as DNS, SSL certificates, firewall settings, etc.