Computers don’t lie, we just don’t always listen

This past week I did one of those TFS restores to swap out hardware.  Things went great except for SSRS.  Who knows what went wrong but looking back, the journey to resolution was interesting.  All to often we see the error and start to hunt and peck.  Sometimes we end up down dead end roads other times we are just lucky.  Reflecting back, hind sight is always 20/20.  In this case the solution was somewhat obvious from the start.

Let the journey begin..

Stand alone TFS installations usually have 2 main IIS Web Sites.  #1. Default, which will include SharePoint and Reporting Services.  #2. Which is TFS.  During the restore process I had a problem where TfsAdminUtil.exe RestoreDT was actually having problems talking with SSRS.  I kept getting the following:

…..

Exception Message: Client found response content type of 'text/html; charset=utf-8', but expected 'text/xml'.

…..

The file you are attempting to save or retrieve has been blocked from this Web site by the server administrators.  

….

Well after a while I just gave up and reconfigured TFS by hand.  I knew that decision was going to bite me in the rear later on but at 2am with time running out, it was time to get-er-done. So once the rest of the restore was done I kicked off a new project creation and guess what, SAME &^%$^# ERROR…  After some sleep it was time to hit it again.  Looking back at the error what struck me as odd was the error seems to imply that SharePoint was getting the web request rather than SSRS.  Sure enough after some digging around a bit more in IIS, IIS Logs, TFS it turned out my SSRS installation was actually instanced so instead of the normal https://server/Reports, it was https://server/Reports_TFS.  Well that fix was easy, tfsadminutil.exe configureConnections did that.  Re-ran “Create New Project” and it failed again but this time a bit farther down the stack.

This time the project creation wizard was saying it was looking for https://server/reports still but everything was configured to be …/reports_tfs. I have no clue where that was coming from but my solution was to just reconfigure SSRS IIS apps to drop the notion of the instance.  Re-Ran the Creation Wizard and now SSRS was hooped. The SSRS manager couldn’t find the SSRS services.  Well that must have meant somewhere in SSRS land it was in fact still pointed to …/Reports_TFS.  Sure enough in the config file for SSRS the URL was there.  Fixed that..

Re-Ran the Project Creation Wizard, Failed.  At this point I was ready for a drink.  Now SSRS was hooped trying to create db objects.  Well it was trying to create db objects that were not on the new instanced SSRS installation.  I searched around for a bit and said screw it.  Lets just rename the db to remove the …$tfs instance name and reconfigure SSRS to point at the new DB name.  Once that was done.

 

 

Moral of the story, more often that not the that error we sometimes just ignore is always a great pointer.  Just don’t ignore it so fast.