The Joys of SRS :S

Last week I had to install Sql Reporting Services on our test environment in order to simulate a production environment installation. Just short of cracking my skull open from excessive head banging against the wall, and knawing on the edge of my desk with frustration, one could say that SRS hasn’t really left me with a warm fuzzy feeling inside, and I’m going to be a nervous wreck when installing it on production. [:-S]

These are the events that unfolded while trying to get SRS installed.

First off, to give you an idea of what we wanted here, was to install SRS across two machines, one machine to be the app server(where the users will navigate to, to access their reports) and one machine to hold the ReportServer and ReportseverTemp DB’s.

Currently our test environment consists of one server, which acts as the app server and the db server, but in order to simulate a production environment, we needed another machine to act as the DB server, and we could keep the current machine as the app server. Hope I haven’t lost anyone with this weird explanation…incidentally, this machine that holds the SRS DB’s is going to be our Test Database Server, so we would need to move any DB’s on the current machine to this new DB Server.

OK, now that you have the background here’s the story.

Another developer had already tried to install SRS on the current test machine, just to try and get it up and running, but after that installation, every time we start up enterprise manager on that machine we’re greeted with this helpful little message :

Well, unfortunately I don’t speak any dialect of GUID, so I’m not really sure WTF that’s supposed to mean, not even trying to access EM from a snap-in in mmc worked!

O well, we managed to register the current machine from another server, just so we could do a backup of the databases, to be restored on the DB Server. I also removed the ReportServer and ReportServerTemp db’s that were created form the previous installation.. looks like SRS doesn’t delete these when you uninstall it.

So now my pain begins… I begin installing SRS, and I choose to use Sql authentication for when accessing the databases, I type in the username and password, wait for the whole installation to reach the end, and I’m shown this heart warming message :

Now it rolls back the entire installation, without giving me the chance to enter a new username and password! This must have happened about 2 or 3 times, because evertime I thought that maybe I had typed in the username and password incorrectly. However after much trawling on the net I found a blog by Tara Duggan who had a similar experience, where the Sql username and password aren’t passed correctly from the GUI in the install, so instead I had to run the installation from a command line like so :

Setup /i <install root>\setup\rsrun.msi RSSETUPACCOUNT=<username> RSSETUPPASSWORD=<password>

Well that seemed to work well, and it had all the signs of a successful install except for a warning message saying “Setup could not initialize the Report Server. You will have to start it manually”.

Naturally I assumed that it was talking about the windows service, because it was stopped, so I started it and tried to navigate to the reports virtual directory in IE, only to be shown a “Page cannot be found”….aaarrrgghhh, so back to google I go, and it turns out that I could have stopped and restarted the windows service until my fingers bled!, what I actually needed to do was run the following command line :

Rsactivate –c “<drive>Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL\Reporting Services\ReportServer\RSReportServer.config”

That seemed to work, but as per usual, yet another problem crept into the wood work. I navigate to the reports virtual directory, but now the only difference is that I now got prompted for my user credentials. If I entered in a domain account’s credentials I got page not found, if I click cancel I get a HTTP Error 401.1. Access Denied. WTF?! I couldn’t believe this. Just problem after problem. Can’t this damn thing just work! Anyway, after much searching, trying to find the smallest clue possible, I see in the event log, two events that describe that SRS had re-created the IUSER_<computername> and IWAM_<computername> accounts! This got me to thinking, that perhaps I needed to re-set the accounts, maybe that would work, I originally thought running aspnet_regiis.exe again would do that, but alas I was wrong. L What I needed to do was edit the c:\inetpub\Adminscripts\ adsutil.vbs search for a string called “IsSecuredProperty = true” and I needed to change it to “IsSecuredProperty = false” save the file and close.

After I had done that I had to run :

Cscript adsutil.vbs get w3svc/anonymoususerpass

This will display the IUSER_<computername> password. If I hadn’t set the IsSecuredProperty = false, it would have just displayed asterisks. I had to take this password and re-type it in the directory security tab in IIS for the virtual directory of Reports and ReportServer, and I had to select allow anonymous access. This removed the HTTP 401.1 error, and I was shown a familiar Sql Reporting Services page! YAY….

But hang on, I couldn’t do anything! I didn’t have any menu functions, like the Contents or Properties tab. I couldn’t upload files or create folders. Eventually the only thing that worked was I had to go to the same place where I had re-typed the IUSER_<computername> password(under the directory Security Tab of the Reports and ReportServer virtual directory, and where I allowed anonymous access), and I had to enter in the credentials of a domain account! Even trying to add the IUSER and IWAM account to the administrators group didn’t help(btw that was a last ditch desparate attempt). If I didn’t enter the domain account credentials, I never got to see the navigation tabs etc.

But now all is working, I don’t like the fact that I have a domain account set up for anonymous access, but I’ll have to find some way around that.

So if you’ve read this far, all I really have to say is that if you’re going to install SRS, plan your whole day around it. There are plenty of people out there who are having hassles with SRS installations, but once you have it installed it can be, imho, one the best reporting tools you’ll ever use. But be warned, installing SRS isn’t as easy as some people make it out to be, and I hope I may have helped some of you out there who are having theses same kinds of problems that I had.

Man, I need a coffee break…..