Follow-up on our Restore Attempt(s)

Two weeks ago today I left the building frustrated with Microsoft because of poor documentation. You can see my rant here.

I'm still a bit miffed that the "How to restore..." document was (and still is as of this writing) wrong, but I'm feeling better that they have graciously apologized to me. And the fact that with the help of Support, we're up and running in the restored test environment. Being I'll most likely forget, here are the steps we had to do to get this test restore environment up and running.

First support walked through the steps 1 - 14 of "Restore and Test SQL Report Server, Reporting Services, and Default Reports" BEFORE we did "Rename the Team Foundation Data-Tier Server and Activate the Team Foundation Application-Tier Server" AND "Move User and Service Accounts" section. Why? I'm not sure if I understood the reasoning.

Second, support did the following steps on the App Tier and Data Tier once I handed over support with Easy Assist.

1) App Tier: Before they ran RenameDT, they changed the ReportSever AppPool identity from NetworkService to the TFSReports account.
2) App Tier: They ran RSKeyMgmt.exe –d which deleted all encrypted data on the server
3) App Tier: They ran RSKeyMgmt.exe –r on the GUID from the initial install of TFS on this new hardware. Somehow this GUID gets re-added?
4) Data Tier: Opened up the tbl_database table in the TfsIntegration database and changed all the ‘servername’ values to the new Data Tier.
5) Data Tier: Opened the tbl_service_interface in the TfsIntegration database and changed ReportsService and BaseReportsURL to have the new App Tier name.
6) In Reporting Services Configuration, they made sure that the TFSReports account was used instead of a built in account.

After they did all this, the RenameDT worked. Like my first point, I'm not sure I understood why they did all this and if it was all really needed.

Third, after "Rename the Team Foundation Data-Tier Server and Activate the Team Foundation Application-Tier Server" we did the "Move User and Service Accounts" section. All this worked just fine.

Fourth, this wasn't really related to the restore per say, but we did have to give the AppTier\Users group Read, List, Read & Execute on the c:\Program Files directory. Without this, the only users that could log in where those who were members of the AppTier\Administrators group. I'm not sure if this is correct, or why the TFS install didn't set it up for us? When I compared this test restore hardware with our current PROD hardware, the current PROD hardware was configured with AppTier\Users have that access to c:\Program Files so we just mimicked the behavior and it all worked. UPDATE: We also had to give AppTier\Users Full Control access to %Program Files%\Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team System Web Access\Cache.

Fifth, we finished steps 15 - 29 of "Restore and Test SQL Report Server, Reporting Services, and Default Reports". This all worked fine.

Sixth, and lastly, we changed the Instance ID so that we didn't have the same Instance ID for both our current PROD hardware and our test restore hardware. See this full forum for how to do this.

After all this, we currently have a test copy of our current PROD system restored so we can play around with it.

What is needed to write complex Reports

There have been a number of people asking me what they need to install in order to get up and running with report writing using the "Business Intelligence Development Studio". Here is what I send them.

1) Install Visual Studio 2005. This step is optional.

2) Install "Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition Toolkit" which gives you the "Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS)"

3) Read Buck's blog and download the attached documentation to get your data sources setup and an initial report written.

4) Obtain a PHD in Computer Science if you have to write any MDX queries.

IE 6.0 crashes with Share Point 3.0

Some of our users have had IE 6.0 crash on them (intermittently) while opening up documents from Share Point 3.0. While the error messages don't exactly match, they are similar to what's described in Steve's post.

I followed up with the users and it seems that Steve's fix, fixes their issues with IE crashing.

Thanks Steve for posting your find!!!! I'm hoping it will get me a free beer at the bar.

Cannot create a connection to data source 'TfsOlapReportDS'. (rsErrorOpeningConnection)

If you ever see an error like below when trying to render a Report in TFS, make sure MS SQL Analysis Services is started under Control Panel > Services. Since we're running a duel server install, our MS SQL Analysis Service is running (or not running when we get this error) on the Data Tier.

An error has occurred during report processing. (rsProcessingAborted)
Cannot create a connection to data source 'TfsOlapReportDS'. (rsErrorOpeningConnection)
For more information about this error navigate to the report server on the local server machine, or enable remote errors

Frustrated with "How to: Move Your Team Foundation Server from One Hardware Configuration to Another"

Nothing frustrates me more than when documentation is wrong or misleading. Case in point: The document "How to: Move Your Team Foundation Server from One Hardware Configuration to Another" explaining how to move TFS from hardware to hardware is probably one of the worst written documents I've ever read. Here are just a few of my observations.

- We've bombed out at "To rename the Team Foundation data-tier server". The first issue was that a small, yet critical, detail is left out of the document. It's missing the statement explaining before running TfsAdminUtil RenameDT you must modify the Service's web.config, making sure the connection string on the new server is referencing the old server. The Community Content says this at the bottom and also the "Microsoft Visual Studio 2005/.NET Framework 2.0" says it. So why doesn't the master document for TFS 2008 say this? If you fail to do the rename, the command comes back and says "data tier name not changed."

- Even after getting past this, we are still stuck though. According the support, we actually should do the "Rename the Team Foundation Data-Tier Server and Activate the Team Foundation Application-Tier Server" and "Move User and Service Accounts" AFTER we do other things like "Restore and Test SQL Report Server, Reporting Services, and Default Reports" which is two sections BELOW "Move User and...". What? If this is true, which we're verifying with our field rep, why does the document have them out of order? How can someone expect to know this?

- Lastly, the support rep (who was actually very helpful by the way), said that you basically have to disconnect the old TFS server when you do the migration. Meaning, you basically can't do a test restore on some QA hardware before you have to come in on a weekend to do the same steps on a live PROD system. We're checking with our field rep to make sure this is accurate, but if it is, which I'm praying it's not, where in this document does it state that you must disconnect the old system before doing the restore based move?

Sorry for my rant. I just get so frustrated when documentation is wrong or misleading.