Here’s a link to a great blog entry by Joel Spolsky (Joel on Software) about programmers who just get the job done and delivered. I’m a great believer in “good enough”. Not perfectly designed, n-tier architecture, reusable web services, but maintainable code, works, gets the job done and gets delivered.
Enough said. Read the article.
We’ve seen this error on and off for quite some time but for some reason we’ve had a batch of calls recently regarding it.
The error occurs when a user attempts to print a report from SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) Report Manager using the printer button on the report viewer. The issue is caused by an update to Windows Server (ActiveX Kill Bits security update) that breaks the printing function in SSRS.
You can read about the update in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956391.
The easiest fix is to apply SQL Server Service Pack 3.
First things first. I would like to give credit to one of our technical consultants, Henry Pollock, for getting to the bottom of this one.
During a recent upgrade, we received the following error when attempting to apply Service Pack 3 on a Dynamics GP 9.0 install on a new Windows Server 2008 box.
Note that the original install of GP 9.0 had gone fine. A little digging and it turns out you need to disable UAC (User Access Control) on Windows Server 2008 prior to running the service pack install.
If I were a betting man, I’d guess we’d come across a similar issue on Vista workstations.
In this day and age of virtualization, it’s not uncommon to copy a base VM, rename it and away you go. But what if SQL Server 2005 is already installed on it? How does renaming affect it?
At first glance it may appear that it has had no affect at all, queries will still work, logins still work. However, there are a few subtle and not so subtle side affects. The first is what SQL Server thinks it’s name is. If you run the following statement:
SELECT @@SERVERNAME
You’ll notice that it returns the old server name, not the new one. This happens even though the name shown in the Object Explorer in Management Studio is showing the correct new name. This will cause a clean Dynamics GP 10 install to fail when attempting to create the “Remove Posted PJOURNALs From All Companies” SQL Agent job as it uses the @@SERVERNAME variable to set that up.
To configure SQL Server to know its new name you’ll have to run the following two statements:
EXEC sp_dropserver 'OLDSERVERNAME'
EXEC sp_addserver 'NEWSERVERNAME', local
Once you’ve run these statements, restart the SQL Server service. This will cause SQL Server to now return the new server name from the @@SERVERNAME variable.
A more noticeable side affect of the server name change is that SQL Reporting Services (SSRS) will not work. This is because it is looking to the old server name for the reporting services databases (ReportServer and ReportServerTempDB). To modify this, perform the following steps:
SSRS will now work.
Now what about changing domains? That’ll have to be another post.
