As my drama with Crystal Reports Server draws to a close, a couple notes. I installed and uninstalled this beast over TS a half dozen times this week. My problems centered around using SQL Server 2k5 Developer edition as the database for the CMS. During install there’s a check box to install MSDE or use an existing SQL Server. I’d leave this checked, and then specify the SQL Domain account, which had the sysadmin role on the SQL server. The install would complete without problem until I got an error about being able to log in to the CMS.

Upon reviewing events, the first thing of obvious note is failed logins to the SQL server from my domain account (Login failed for user ‘DOMAIN\user’. [CLIENT: x.x.x.x]). It makes sense that it would use my windows credentials to install the database during setup, as I’m already logged in, but it would be nice if it would install a service set to run with the provided credentials and startup, at least to let me know if it had problems with using the credentials. Anyways, the database WOULD get created (Starting up database ‘BOE11’.) and the CMS would start up (Central Management Server started) only to follow with two errors: “Cannot write key (DatabaseDriver) to registry.” and “The root server reported an error Initialization Failure.” The newly created database would be empty and the other CR services would fail with: “Failed to register with the CMS sylvanus. Please make sure the CMS is up and running. Attempting an automatic retry…”.

Forcing the CMS to start would usually appear successful but other services would not follow suit. The following error could be found in the event viewer: “Cannot connect to name server hostname(Transport error: unable to retrieve the CMS factory.) “

It appeared that the CMS was trying to read it’s config out of the database, but nothing was there. I tried mucking around with the access configuration a lot, failed to get any support out of Business Objects, and eventually just decided to install using SQL server authentication instead, which worked fine.

I did notice that Crystal Reports Server XI Release 2 was required for Visual Studio 2005 support, and I downloaded that as the “supported platforms” only listed SQL 2005 for this version and not for the initial release, but found no mention of this new support in the release notes so they may have just got around to updating the list. I did not try installing from this source and I’ve put this project behind me as it’s taken far too much time already.