Sometimes when you perform a new install of SQL Server Reporting Services locally on your machine, you get excited and enter the URL in your browser: http://localhost/Reports only to find your hopes and dreams of becoming a Reporting Services megastar shattered with an error message:
User 'domain\username' does not have required permissions. Verify that sufficient permissions have been granted and Windows User Account Control (UAC) restrictions have been addressed.
Trying out the ReportServer URL http://localhost/ReportServer gives you a similar result – The permissions granted to user ‘domain\username’ are insufficient for performing this operation. (rsAccessDenied).
I have read some posts that suggested tweaking IE’s Tools / Internet Options / Security Tab / Local Intranet Sites / Advanced / “Add this website to the zone” option is required.
That placing the URL to the intranet site helps. But IE already knows the site is an Intranet one for localhost since the Option for Local Intranet is checked by default ‘Include all local (Intranet) sites not listed in other zones’
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Most post on how to fix this are correct – it has to do with SSRS Role Assignment but what may not be obvious is that Role Assignment needs to be done in 2 places.
Open IE as an Administrator and click Yes for the UAC dialog warning. |
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In my case I am running Windows 7 SP1 64 Bit. IE 8, SSRS 2008 R2 Developer Edition installed locally. If you run IE as Administrator and try http://localhost/Reports/ it works. If not you have some serious configuration issues that this post will not help with.
Click on ‘Site Settings’ from the top navigation menu, then the Security tab, then click New Role Assignment
Basically what you want is to add your domain or local machine name \ username as System Administrator at the Site Level. However this still wont let you into Report Manager under your normal account even if you are an administrator of your own machine. If you exit IE and go back in under your own account, you’ll still get the same error. Huh? Didn’t you just become the site’s administrator?
Yes but you also have to become a Content Manager for the Home folder – off which all other folders will inherit. From Home, click Folder Settings
This time the Role options are different. There is no System Administrator as was the case for Sites previously. You must select yourself as a Content Manager. Any folder you later create off the root Home folder will inherit these permissions. It you want users to have specific permissions to folders off the root Home folder you can do so, similar to a File Structure under Windows.
When you open IE as your regular account, it should work. Of course you could still have some other deep rooted problems with configuration files. If you run Vista, install Windows 7 with SP1 and all your problems will be solved (just kidding but why prolong the pain). If you can, and I know its not possible in cases if you have a large number of reports and SQL Agent jobs, uninstall SQL Server and start again. Often hours of backing up, installing and restoring DB’s and reports is faster than productive days lost trying to figure out why.
Remember SSRS 2008 doesn’t have a dependency on IIS like 2005 did. You wont find a web site under your IIS folder structures. If you do it’s a left over from a previous version. So don’t lose time thinking IIS security may be involved.
And use Internet Explorer for Report Manager as Firefox will report the site as running in Quirks mode, showing several CSS and JS errors that cause rendering issues and loss of functionality like drop down menu’s for Folders not working. Other browsers may report the same. It would appear cross browser compatibility was not in the design specs and this is probably ok for most environments from an SSRS administrative point of view.
