Migrating SSRS Manager to a new IIS Server: Part 2

In my previous post I blogged about my seemingly not so common problem where an SSRS database is on one server, the Reports Manager is hosted on another server, and I need to migrate the Reports Manager to a new IIS server.  Sound confusing?  Well it was for someone who has never done that; plus it's no secret that SSRS isn't the easiest beast to configure.

After waisting pleanty of time researching what turned out to be oddities (read: misconfigurations) of the new domain account SSRS services needed to run under, I finally got it with the help of some online resources.  Here's a play-by-play of what I ran in to when migrating the web end of SSRS to another server:

As I mentioned in the previous post, when attempting to initialize SSRS and pointing to a Reports database already being used by another server's SSRS service, SSRS assumes you are scaling out your web deployment.  Since I didn't want to do that, I had to shut off the SSRS service on the old IIS box before I could start it on the new server I was migrating to.

Once started, I opened SSRS Configuration Manager and navigated to the Initialization tab.  I saw both the old and new servers listed in the Initialization list and deleted them both.  Next, I closed the SSRS Configuration Manager and re-opened it to get a fresh look.  I went back to the Initialization tab and saw only the new server listed and thought I was on the road to success.  I pressed the Initialize button at the bottom of the screen and I got an error with the key word in it: RSReportServerNotActivated.  I had no clue what this meant.  Was the server running a trial of SQL Server that wasn't registered?  No.  Will the log files help me?  They didn't.  Well, let's Google it!  And it brought me here:

This MSDN article explaining how to initialize a Report Server is where I started.  It's a short article worth a read for anyone doing this.  The article didn't go deep in to my situation of migrating the web end of SSRS to another server but it did give me another link discussing the RSReportServerNotActivated error.

That article was about troubleshooting initialization and encryption key errors.   What I got out of that article was the new web server wasn't referencing the SSRS encryption keys (see the SSRS Configuration Manager's Encryption Keys tab) and was therefore failing.  The answer was to load those encryption keys on the new server or delete them.  Since I didn't know where the key was, I ended up deleting the reference to the encryption keys.  This wasn't as big of a deal as it sounded because the only encrypted content I had was the connection string in a report datasource object.  So after deleting the keys, I went back to the initialization tab, initialized the server, and all was good to go - or so it seemed.

Now it was time for the moment of truth.  I opened up IE and navigated to the local reports manager site.  The home page opened but it was almost blank.  There was no link to add reports, no links for my existing reports.  Time to hit Google again!  That's when I found this MSDN forum article where someone had the same exact problem.  Turns out the problem was solved with some IIS configuration setting changes for the Reports and Reports Manager web sites.  Once I disabled anonymous access to those sites, SSRS was able to authenticate me as a Reports admin and I was able to see and manage everything.

The final step was to reconfigure that reports datasource object that got nuked when I deleted the reference to the encryption key.  Once I re-added the conection string to the datasource, reports were being served from the new IIS box and I was good to go!