MOSS / Reporting Services Integration Issue

After a short (but nice) break over Christmas, I am spending a little time getting ‘the little things’ finished off that I had no time to do in the last half of 2007. On off these things includes completing my new MOSS development image with everything included!

But for the past half a day I have been pulling my hair out trying to resolve a couple of issues with configuration of reporting services, while most of these have been relatively simple fixes and alignment of permissions for access . I have come across one particularly nasty little bug!

During the MOSS / Reporting Services configuration process there is a step where you assign permissions to the Reporting Services Service accounts to be able to access the MOSS databases. Unfortunately for me when trying to enter these details I keep getting an error stating “A new member could not be added to a local group because the member has the wrong account type”. After checking permissions for the groups that the service account details (and passwords) were correct and even a read through the help files (yeah I even went to RTFM!!!) I came up with nothing. I found a number of similar issues doing a search on Google but nothing conclusive until I found the end of this Microsoft Support Case.

It appears that there is a bug in the integration between MOSS and SQL Reporting Services 2005 that when you come to assign the permissions the process wants to assign the service account to a local security group. Now since I have built everything on one server (including Domain Controller functions) there are no local security group’s only domain security groups. Needless to say this is an issue with my development image. You’ll note that at the bottom on the support case it notes a possible work around, using either the FQDN or the server IP address may work around the issue.

For me the FQDN got past the original error message but provided me with the error “Report Server WMI Provider error: Invalid namespace“. Which I didn’t investigate any further at this point. Using the IP Address of the server has allowed the process to complete and me to complete the configuration of the MOSS / Reporting Services integration, however I have yet to test how this functions in a full MOSS reporting site, so it is possible I could be back to square one (but for the moment I have a workaround).

Hopefully this may help people in a similar situation in the future…