I have a Receive Location that monitors a folder on an FTP server, and if there are files available, it gets the files and sends them through email, an extremely simple process. When the process starts, I receive the files correctly by email, but when I go to the BizTalk Administration Console, the Receive Location is unexpectedly disabled. This occurs systematically after receiving the file from the FTP.
When I check the Event Viewer, I found the following error logged:
“The receive location “ErrorMonitor Location” with URL “ftp://IP:21// OUT/log_err_*” is shutting down. Details:”The error threshold was exceeded. “.
📝 One-Minute Brief
This technical guide addresses a common BizTalk 2006/R2 issue where FTP receive locations shut down automatically. The error “threshold was exceeded” usually triggers when the adapter fails to connect or process files after several attempts. The post explains how to diagnose the root cause (network latency, permissions, or firewall) and how to adjust the Error Threshold settings in the BizTalk Administration Console to prevent unwanted downtime.
Cause
First, you need to understand the behavior of the BizTalk 2006 (R2) FTP Adapter:
- The BizTalk Server 2006 FTP adapter uses the FTP client protocol to poll the designated FTP server and retrieve data from the server “as is.” The FTP adapter does not validate any data that it retrieves. The FTP adapter sends the retrieved document to the BizTalk Messaging Engine for processing, and then it deletes the original document from the FTP server.
Second, you need to understand the configuration variables for an FTP Receive Location, in particular, this:
- Error Threshold: Specify the number of errors that BizTalk Server can encounter before the location is disabled. (Default value: 10)
Therefore, the first thing I checked was the permissions of my user on the folder of the FTP that I’m monitoring… the result was that I had only read privileges, and this is what was causing me the problem because, as I said earlier, the behavior of the adapter is: deletes the original document from the FTP server.
Solution
- Set the user permissions so that it has read and write access to that specific folder on the FTP Server.
