So I found another weird quirck with Reporting Services tonight, that is a must share in case anyone else runs across it. My server setup at home doesn't run IIS on the default port 80, but rather on port 8181. This is for security reasons since its publicly open via my Cable modem service (but behind my firewall/router).

On my server, I wanted to get reporting services installed so I can do some reporting against the anonymous usage statistics being collected via WebDeploy. So, briefly - my default website is running on port 8181, and the reporting services installation doesn't prompt you to determine which website you wish to use.

Attempt #1:

I ran the installation CD as well as the SP1 CD. Everything went fine, no errors, nothing. I open up IE, point my browser to http://localhost:8181/Reports and nothing happens. I get a 404 error. Hmm, what could be wrong? Okay, so I open up IIS management, and much to my amazement, there sits 2 websites. The first default one being my main website running on port 8181. There exists another default website (yes they are named the same) which is running on port 80, and guess what...it has the 2 virtual directories Reports and ReportServer.

Okay, so I manually add virtual directories (configuring them the same) to my port 8181 website, remove the port 80 website and refresh the browser. This time it prompts me for a user, however when it does go through its normal ASP.NET startup, it gives me some nasty error.

Okay, so I figured if reporting services installed everything on a port website, it'll look for a port 80 website to uninstall the virtual directories. So I change the ports to port 80 on my port 8181 site. Uninstall went smoothly, and everything was gone.

Attempt #2:

So after the uninstall, I figured I'll just leave the website at port 80 until after install. So thats what I do...I install reporting services and SP1 all over again. This time, the 2 virtual directories are created in the proper website...yay! Okay, so I test things out in the browser using port 80...things look good, awesome! Time to change that port back to 8181...done. Refresh the browser for 8181, and what do I see? Well that nasty error message has creeped back up. Okay, so its gotta be something in the configuration...

I open up file explorer, and browse to c:\program files\microsoft sql server\mssql\reporting services\reportmanager and notice that there are 3 config files. I start with web.config...hmm, nothing looks like what I want there...okay, onto the next config. I open up RSWebApplication.config and what do I see? Well, there's a XML element with a URL to the report server sitting right there...and it had http://<ServerName>/ReportServer sitting there. So, I change that to http://<URL>:8181/ReportServer, save the config file and open up IE again. Refresh the page, and whammo, things are working again.

So, I guess the moral of this story is be cautious on how your server is setup with Reporting Services. I also find it quite odd that URLs are hard-coded within configuration files, and that its highly dependent on those for usability. To me, this doesn't seem flexible for users who didn't know what they were doing.