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I installed a new VM with SQL Server in it, along with Win 7 and Reporting Services. The plan was to mess with this as a detailed journey through to learning more about SSRS this year.

I was excited to get going on this new install since I hadn’t messed with SSRS much since 2005, and then on one of our test servers for SQLServerCentral. So I fired it up, having run through the installation defaults and browsed to the Report Manager to get:

Seriously? No IIS on a default install, and SS2K8 SSRS shouldn’t require it. I’m an admin on my own box, so what’s the deal. Actually this is a Firefox issue that requires that I clean up a few things and store off the name password.

However, once that was done, I connected and found a blank report manager screen. That was very, very annoying.

At first I was fairly torque’d. After all, this is a dev setup that’s common, and having stuff not work like this really doesn’t do the SSRS brand much good in the eyes of developers.

Now I’m not on a domain, I’m standalone, which is likely not common. It’s also probably that the DBA sets up SSRS on the server and developers connect, but I think lots of them have local instances to test reports against.

So what do I do? I dug around the Internet and found a lot of fragmented advice. The big one was that I needed to setup roles for SSRS, but I had to use Report Manager to do that. And as you can see above, there’s no “Properties” tab above. The final advice that seemed to work for me was a need to log in as administrator. Not an administrator, but as administrator itself.

How do you do that in Vista or Win 7? Administrator is buried on those OSes, and for good reason. Otherwise people would likely use it all the time. I tried running IE as Administrator, but that didn’t work. That was one of the first suggestions I’d see, so I had to log into the machine itself. To do that, first you need an administrative command prompt.

Then you run this: “net use administrator /active:yes”

When you then do a “switch user” and get the login screen, the administrative account is visible. I logged into that, connected to Report Manager, and added my account as a content owner and publisher.

Back to my account and I’m golden. I can now see my main screen.

I’m not sure why the IE-as-administrator did not work, but if it fails for you, this should help.

I have been a fan of 37 Signals for some time, and I read their blog regularly. I think they go a great job of writing about how to run a business and not build an investment.
Rework is a summary of quite a bit of advice from their blog that has been rewritten and compiled. It’s a business book that give you advice on how to start your own business, how to hire people, how to get motivated in a real way.
This isn’t the book for someone that wants to start a company and sell it for a million dollars. It’s not a book that helps you get rich quick. It’s a book that tries to get you to think about how business actually works, build something that you are proud of, and something that succeeds.
The book is a series of chapters, each broken into short 1-2 pages snippets of information on a particular topic. Each section has an illustration from the 37 Signals artist, all of them quick sketches, and many of them humorous looks at the topic.
You could get all of this information from their blog, but it’s nicely summarized and edited in this book. It’s not a reprint of the blog, it’s a rewrite of the same information, but cleaned up. They talk about how their initial draft was twice as long, but then cut down the verbosity to get to the meat of the topics. That’s advice they give you for business as well. Don’t use more words than you need.
Something I need to learn.
This is a great business, book, in my opinion. One that’s worth reading if you are even thinking of starting your own business.

I saw this article on the improvements from E-ink that are coming. There are two videos, one of a better screen that can handle simple animations, likely getting into actual products you can by in about a year (early 2011).

The other was low power, but more durable. The guy in the second video smashes a fist into the screen.

Impressive.

I like the idea of e-ink, but after having a Kindle, and and  iPhone, the iPhone just works better.

My Windows Home Server died a month ago, just as I was getting ready to leave the country. I didn’t have time to deal with it, but since I was still in the process of moving data over to it, I felt fairly safe. When I got back to it a couple weeks ago, I found that a disk drive had died, and it must have been the boot drive as the BIOS reported a “disk read error” on startup.

Rather than panic, I searched around and found this thread on the Microsoft site that noted how to copy data off disks. That’s an easy one, basically drop the disk in another machine, show hidden folders, look for the “data” folder. I copied all the pictures, music, and video off the drive. Backups were gone, but I was OK with that for now.

The next step was to get new drives. I isolated the broken one, RMA’d it to Western Digital, which went well, and then went out and bought a new drive. I got another 2TB drive, and an external enclosure from NewEgg. Those allow me to easily add more space since the inside of my old Dell E521 is crowded.

While waiting for new drives, I reinstalled my 1TB, 2TB, and a slightly older 320GB drive into the machine and re-ran setup for Home Server. That’s easy and I was back up. I used the same password and machine name, but I found something interesting.

My client machines could connect to the shared folders, but I couldn’t setup a backup. Must be some signature/encryption link. However if you rerun setup for the Connector software, it takes a few minutes, and then it rebuilds everything as it was.

That’s done, I’ve copied music, video, and pictures back to the Home Server for sharing, and reset backups on 2 machines. My wife needs to do hers and we’ll be protected again.

At least internally. I need to get something going offsite, at least for the photos.