Error 20508 followed by "cannot insert value NULL"

SQL Server 2000 (SP4), running on Windows 2003, transactional
replication.

The publisher is in a workgroup, in one of our DMZs. The (push)
subscriber is on our internal network. This topology has been running
succesfully for quite a while (over a year).

Yesterday, I applied a large number of inserts/updates within a
transaction on the subscriber. During this process (it took several
hours), an error appeared, error 20508, stating that "The text/ntext/
image values inserted at Subscriber will be NULL". However, given that
it continued to perform processing, and didn't cause the whole trigger
to rollback, I assumed that this was going to be somewhat okay.I
believed I'd be able to update these particular rows later at the
publisher, if needs be.

This morning, when I arrived, the long-running query had completed. I
checked the tables in the publisher and the subscriber. On the
publisher, the values in the text column appeared to be a blank
string. The subscriber had the strings expected. I produced a script
to update the rows on the subscriber to the values I wanted, and I
assumed replication would sort itself out (I was thinking it may
generate a false conflict or something like that).

However, on further review, I find that the push synchronizations
haven't been succesfully occurring since the early hours of this
morning. The error message is that it "cannot insert value NULL into
column X". Now, the column in question isn't nullable, but given it
seemed to cope with this matter at the publisher (by inserting a blank
string instead), I'm not sure what to do with it now.

I could, obviously, tear down the replication, build a new snapshot,
then rebuild the replication. However,that's not a particularly fast
solution since the DB is ~80GB and we'd have to pull the snapshot down
over a relatively slow link.

Can anyone suggest any troubleshooting steps I could follow, or any
additional info that I've missed out?

Thanks,

Damien

On Oct 22, 2:10 pm, Damien <Damien_The_Unbelie....RemoveThis@hotmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
>
> Yesterday, I applied a large number of inserts/updates within a
> transaction on the subscriber. During this process (it took several
> hours), an error appeared, error 20508, stating that "The text/ntext/
> image values inserted at Subscriber will be NULL". However, given that
> it continued to perform processing, and didn't cause the whole trigger
> to rollback, I assumed that this was going to be somewhat okay.I
> believed I'd be able to update these particular rows later at the
> publisher, if needs be.
>
[snip]
>
> However, on further review, I find that the push synchronizations
> haven't been succesfully occurring since the early hours of this
> morning. The error message is that it "cannot insert value NULL into
> column X". Now, the column in question isn't nullable, but given it
> seemed to cope with this matter at the publisher (by inserting a blank
> string instead), I'm not sure what to do with it now.
>
[snip]

I've managed to resolve my specific problem now - I altered the
automatically generated insert stored proc on the subscriber to
explicitly check for null and replace with an empty string. Now
everything has synchronized, I've reverted the procedure back to the
MS generated one.

Damien