Reporting Services authentication on a Windows XP workgroup

After setting up my RAID server, I had installed Reporting Services on it, but until today I had not been able to connect to it from other computers in the workgroup. I would get the login prompt, but it would not accept any valid users.

After a lot of wasted time googling down the wrong trails, I finally found this excellent article that does a great job of explaining and provided the solution: http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/wxpsimsh.html

The problem is on Windows XP, "simple file sharing" is turned on by default AND when it is, no matter what logon / password you use, the server uses the Windows Guest account instead. So even though I entered BlahBlahTest as the username, I was getting access denied messages because even through BlahBlahTest has access, Guest does not.

The weird thing is that I had tried turning off simple file sharing earlier in the night, and not only did it not fix the Reporting Services problem, but it also broke the file share I already had set up under simple file sharing; so I had turned it back on immediately.

The next day, I read this article, tried turning off simple file sharing again, created a new share -- for testing... both the new share and the existing share were fine, AND Reporting Services authentication worked perfectly. Weird and frusrating, but I'm happy it's fixed!

I had tried setting up VPN and a few other things requiring authentication a year or more ago, and had all kinds of problems. Now I realize that it was probably the same issue, it was ignoring the account I had set up, and using the Guest account instead. I'm excited to try some of this stuff again. Blogging this to remember what the deal was and save hours of googling again :)

Another useful thing I learned is that with Windows XP and higher, you can go into User Accounts on the control panel, and on the sidebar there is an option to "Manage your network passwords". By adding entries here, you aren't forced to use the same user on both the server and client machines. If your client user is different, just store the appropriate name and password for the network share here so you aren't prompted each time. Cool!

Just make sure simple file sharing is turned off on the server so it's not actually using the Guest account. ;)