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When deploying reports to a SQL Reporting Instance using a host header/clustered NLB hostname you get an error – The network path was not found

We recently came across an issue where we are trying to use a Network Load Balanced SQL Reporting instances and hence we are using a clustered hostname, a host header. This issue is not specific to using NLB, but specific to using a host header.

In your SQL Server Reporting Configuration, if you specify a hsot header for your web services and/or reporting manager, when browsing the URLs from a remote machine you will get an HTTP 401.1 – Unauthorized: Logon Failed error message.

This is due to the fact that Windows Server will try to protect you from the issue describe in this KB896861

However in this scenario we had already applied the second method which is to set the DisableLoopbackCheck registry key (and we dont recommend that you ever use that method). So this got rid of the HTTP 401.1 error

Next if we try to deploy Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 reports using the AX management utilities, we get the following error:

The network path was not found.
If User Account Control (UAC) is enabled on the machine, close the application, right-click the application, and then click Run as administrator.

We get the same error if we run the Test-AXReportServerConfiguration powershell cmdlet from the AX Management Utilities:

PS C:\Windows\system32> Test-AXReportServerConfiguration -verbose > error.txt
VERBOSE: Testing report server configuration: AXTEST.
VERBOSE: Getting status for 02 AOS instance on server AX-SRV-01.
VERBOSE: Verifying administrative access to server: AX-SRV-01.
VERBOSE: Verifying administrative access to server: RS-SRV-01.
Test-AXReportServerConfiguration : An error occurred : The network path was not
 found.
If User Account Control (UAC) is enabled on the machine, close the application,
 right-click the application, and then click Run as administrator.
At line:1 char:33

This error is similar to the issue described on this blog post however as per the post, the Remote Registry service was enabled on the Reporting Server!

After further troubleshooting we isolated the issue was not being solved by using the DisableLoopbackCheck registry key as per  KB896861, but instead we had to delete this key and use the BackConnectionHostNames registry key instead.

We than had to reboot the reporting server to make the changes effective.

 

So in summary,

– do not use the DisableLoopbackCheck registry key as per KB896861. If you have this delete it

– instead use the BackConnectionHostNames registry key as per KB896861 and specify all the Reporting instance host header hostnames in use by the reporting web service and/or reports manager

– reboot the server after editing the BackConnectionHostNames registry key to make the changes effective

 

MORE INFO:

Similar strategy also applies when using host headers with websites hosting Enterprise Portal, see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh352312.aspx for more info.