Reporting Services Installation Woes

From: Jordan (jblaydes_at_biznetsoftware.com)
Date: 02/03/04 

Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2004 15:28:51 -0800

Below is my experience with Reporting Services as well as
an issue that we are currently experiencing. Our company
has been using Reporting Services since the Rosetta Beta
and recently upgraded to the Evaluation Edition released
on January 27th. Some issues I have encountered:

1. After installing on Windows Server 2003, you receive
this error message when going to the /reports directory:

"Session state has been disabled for ASP.NET. Report
Manager requires that session state be enabled."

I could never get past this on Windows Server 2003, and I
encountered at least six other errors before finally
getting stuck on this one. Editing the web.config file to
use InProc or SQLServer session states didn't work. And
all the "rs -activate" in world couldn't put humpty back
together again. After two weeks trying Beta1 and most
recently, Eval Edition, not to mention three Windows 2003
Servers, we punted on Server 2003.

THE ONLY WAY OUR DEVELOPERS HAVE BEEN ABLE TO USE
REPORTING SERVICES IS WITH THE FOLLOWING CONFIGURATIONS:

Local Database and Application Server:
Windows Server 2000 w/ SP4
SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition w/ SP3a
+ Hotfix KB810185
SQL Server Reporting Services Beta 2
IIS 5.0
(Using NT AUTHORITY/NETWORK SERVICE and Service Account
as SQL Login)

Remote Setup:
Database Server -
Windows Server 2000 w/ SP4
SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition w/ SP3a

Application Server -
Windows Server 2000 w/ SP4
SQL Server 2000 Client Components
SQL Server Reporting Services Evaluation Edition
IIS 5.0

Development Desktop -
Windows 2000 Professional SP4/XP Pro SP1
Visual Studio .NET 2003 Enterprise Architect
SQL Server Reporting Services Evaluation Edition Client
Components

To prep the setup, we had to create a domain account for
the Report Service, as well as a SQL Login for the
database. ANOTHER REALLY IMPORTANT TIP: Make sure that
you are logged into the Application Server machine as the
Domain Account you specify in the Setup. This Domain User
must have rights to the Database Server machine. Even
after providing all of this information to use for
creation of the Service and Database, the installation
threw the error: "SQL Setup failed to connect to the
database service for database setup. The error was Login
failed for NT AUTHORITY/ANONYMOUS LOGON". The FINAL
solution was to add NT AUTHORITY/ANONYMOUS LOGON (ANON)
as System Admin of the SQL Server database and give
rights to "master". This is a horrible security leak in
this application. We left this configuration as is, and
the Setup made ANON db_owner of ReportsServer and
ReportServerTempDB. Our next test is to determine if ANON
can be removed and then the original SQL Login can be
assigned as db_owner.

SO - FINALLY IT WORKS - Now with the real issues:

When creating reports based on Access Queries in an .mdb
and using the OLEDB Provider as a data source, there
seems to be a scalability issue. Only one person can view
the report at a time when using an Access backend. When
trying to view the report from multiple machines
(especially when not using the development machine it was
created on), you receive the following error:

"An error has occurred during report processing.
(rsProcessingAborted) Get Online Help
Cannot create a connection to data source 'DataSource1'.
(rsErrorOpeningConnection) Get Online Help
The Microsoft Jet database engine cannot open the
file '\\Apw3ks02\Datafiles\Gateway.mdb'. It is already
opened exclusively by another user, or you need
permission to view its data."

My DataSource1
syntax: "Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data
Source=\\Apw3ks02\Datafiles\Gateway.mdb"
with No Credentials required.

SO - Anyone who has actually installed reporting services
and has tried to create reports, please let me know if
you've had any of the same issues with data sources.

Thanks,
Jordan
www.biznetsoftware.com

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