I came to the conclusion that the server always returned this error after exactly 2 minutes, so it had to be a timeout exception.

The report was kind of big, so tuning it would not really help (enough).

I took me some time to find out which timeout setting to change, because there seem be a lot of them:

There is the Query Execution timeout of the Dataset, a Report Execution timeout, the Connection timeout of IIS, other timeouts in the Report Server Configuration file, …

But the real cause of this timeout is an Execution timeout of Sharepoint.

You can change this timeout setting in the web.config of your Sharepoint site, by default in c\:inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80.

In this web.config you will find an XML node called “httpRuntime”. In this node you have to add an extra tag: executionTimeout=”9000″:

<httpRuntime maxRequestLength=”51200″ executionTimeout=”9000″ />

Save and close the file and do an IISReset. When you run the report again, you won’t get this error anymore.

I also checked the web.config of the Report Manager, but in Native Mode this seems to be the default:

Good luck!

• Opening Keynote by Wesley Backelant and Ritchie Houtmeyers
• Best Practices for SQL Server Consolidation by Tom Van Mulders
• Breaking the ETL world record with Integration Services by Henk van der Valk
• Designing Effective Aggregations in Analysyis Services 2008 by Chris Webb
• High availability for BI DWH by Patrick Tack
• How New.NET Development technologies could change the live of the SQL DBA guy/girl by Gill Cleeren & Kurt Claeys
• Implementing best practices with Policy Based Management by Nico Jacobs
• Introducing to PowerPivot or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Excel by Chris Webb
• Tracking Changes and Data movement in SQL Server 2008 by Dirk Gubbels
• Handling XML in SQL Server by Nico Jacobs

Have fun!

Data Refresh Failed: Unable to retrieve external data for the following connections:

<<connection>>

The data sources may be unreachable, may not be responding, or may have denied you access.

Verify that data refresh is enabled for the trusted file location and that the workbook data authentication is correctly set.

But the file was in an Excel Services Trusted Location and so was the data source.

Finally I found the following error message in the Sharepoint Log (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\LOGS):

Excel Services can not use credential delegation when it is configured to use a trusted subsystem with Windows SharePoint Server

Ok that explains it: when they installed Excel Services on this new machine they did not configure it to use Delegation Mode.

To change Excel Services to use Delegation Mode, you need to use the command line tool stsadm. Execute the following statements in a command window:

Cd C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN

stsadm -o set-ecssecurity -accessmodel delegation -ssp SharedServices1

stsadm -o execadmsvcjobs

iisreset

This should do it. Enjoy!

Today, I tried to publish an Infopath Form to MOSS, but I received the following error message:

The following URL is not valid: http://servername/sites/sitename

Different solutions are available for this problem, but in my case the cause seemed to be that there was no root site (http://servername).

So the solution was to edit the site collection and create a site with URL “/”