Saturday, February 25, 2012

Reporting Services datasource corruption?

We are having a problem with our Reporting Services data sources becoming corrupted and returning the cryptic "bad data" error. This happened for all reports on one server. Our network guys have recently been testing password aging and strong passwords in Active Directory which caused a problem initially. The solution to this problem has been to re-deploy the reports with the overwrite datasource option set to "True".

Has anyone heard of such a problem before? Initially when we called Microsoft they thought that the security keys were corrupt and had us reset them. I'm starting to think that wasn't the problem at all and resetting the keys has created new problems.

Any facts, theories, or heresay would be welcome.

For stored credentials, the information is encrypted. Messing around with passwords could cause problems.

One thing to always do when setting up a report server is to make a backup of the encryption key. You can do this with the Configuration tool. Backing up the key will allow you to reapply the key in situations where things like this happen. Then you will not have to through the difficulties you are now.

|||We found out what the problem was. The security key was changed, but the old one was cached, so when it refreshed after 29 hours, it reverted to the old key, thus breaking everything.

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