Learning to Cope with Reporting Services Nightmares

Shan McArthur

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Learning to Cope with Reporting Services Nightmares

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Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services 2005 is a great tool - IF - you can get it running. I have experienced an extreme amount of grief trying to configure and operate reporting services. This blog entry covers some of the approaches I have used to get it under control. I REALLY hope that someone in the SQL 2008 Reporting Services team will read this blog and take the necessary steps to make these nightmares turn into real dreams.

Installing on a non-default website

Reporting services uses integrated security, which really works well on a default website that resolves to the current host name. It however does not work out-of-the-box when you try to configure it for use on a non-default website, despite the configuration tool making it look like it is easy to do. You know it is not working when you get authentication issues.

Here is the official Microsoft article on how to configure Reporting Services for non-default websites. Note that when you use the Reporting Services Configuration tool and use a non-default website, it does not properly update the rsConfig file - you must edit that file by hand.

That is only part of the solution. The other part is that you have to disable the LSA loopback check otherwise the website will not allow integrated security, which then causes Reporting Services to fail. Here is a KB article on how to disable the lookup check.

File Security Issues

Installing Reporting Services frequently does not update the ACLs on the log and configuration folders of Reporting services. The solution is to manually add ACLs to the reporting services folders for the network service account, or any other credential that you use to run reporting services with. The symptoms are that you see events in the event log that say that it could not read the configuration, or events that say that they cannot write the error to the log file.

Windows 2008 Server

I do most of my installs on Windows 2008 recently, and there are a couple of additional preparation steps required to install reporting services on Windows 2008. Mostly, they are ensuring that all of your legacy IIS management, authentication, and other IIS features are enabled. Here is a technet page on how to install and configure reporting services on Windows 2008.

Can't uninstall - therefore cannot reinstall

I have frequently found myself in a position where I need to reinstall Reporting Services. I go through the uninstall of SQL and reporting services, but the uninstall doesn't work. Reinstalling is not possible either, so I am stuck. I have found this article helpful: how to uninstall an instance of SQL Server 2005 manually