Sunday, March 25, 2012

Configuration Error on Encryption Key

I came across an issue while configuring SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services. In the reporting services configuration tool, there is a step the either Backup, Restore, or Change the encryption key for the new Reporting Services instance. I backed up the key since this is the first installation of SQL Server and Reporting Services on this machine.

I had expected that the configuration would then allow me to progress to the next step in the configuration, "Initialization". But regardless of how I handle the Encryption Key step, the option to move "Initialization" does not become available.
Has anyone had this happen to them? Or better yet, does anyone have a solution to this?

The report server only needs to be manually initialized if you are connecting the server to a web farm. It is needed to ensure that all nodes in the farm are using the same encryption key. In your case, since you have backed up the key, the report server is already initialized. The option is likely disabled because you are using an edition of SQL Server that does not support web farms (it is only available in enterprise and developer editions).|||Yep, I found that to be the case yesterday while trying to troubleshoot this.
I was checking on another server trying to find where the setup went wrong and determined that the issue is actually that the Initialization step didn't become available as it should. There must have been an error in one of the preceding steps that didn't show up as it should have.
At this point I am going to try and run the command-line initialization to complete the setup. And if that doesn't work, I'll probably have to uninstall and re-install Reporting Services.

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