Users in Site Settings do not work

[jeremyhagan]

I have PowerBIRS and SSRS installed in seperate instances on the same server using the same service account.

If I log into the WebUI as a user who is member of BUILTIN\Administrators on the PowerBI instance I can edit the site settings and add new users and groups to the "System Administrator" and "System User" roles, but those users can't subsequently log in. They get the message in the attached screen cap.

HOWEVER, If I perform the exact same steps on the vanilla SSRS instance, the user role assignment works fine.

So there must be some difference in the config between the two instances, rather than an infrastructure issue.

How can I make the RBAC work in PowerBI RS?

[jeremyhagan · Accepted solution]

The problem turned out to be PEBKAC. I didn't understand that a user who is a Sys Admin doesn't automatically get any permissions to the content structure with the Browse page at all.

[Jon-Heide]

Hi Jeremy - the behavior described seems strange. A couple things to check when running side by side:

1. Double check the URL reservations are correctly pointing to the instance. It's common to have URL reservations accidentally point to the incorrect instance. You can check that by running netsh http show urlacl

2. Unless you have a firm requirement, it's better to run the servers with different service accounts. Just run them as their own independant virtual service accounts.

3. Double check they are not using the same catalog database, each instance needs it's own catalog. Running scale out across PBIRS and SSRS is not supported.

Note that builtin\administrators always have admin access to the server, it's the fallback in case you accidentally delete all server admins.

[jeremyhagan]

Hi,

The PowerBIRS web site works fine, so I don't see how the URL reservation would be an issue.

The two instances are using different config DBs on the same remote DB instance

The service account is a domain account

[jeremyhagan]

I have PowerBIRS and SSRS installed in seperate instances on the same server using the same service account.

If I log into the WebUI as a user who is member of BUILTIN\Administrators on the PowerBI instance I can edit the site settings and add new users and groups to the "System Administrator" and "System User" roles, but those users can't subsequently log in. They get the message in the attached screen cap.

HOWEVER, If I perform the exact same steps on the vanilla SSRS instance, the user role assignment works fine.

So there must be some difference in the config between the two instances, rather than an infrastructure issue.

How can I make the RBAC work in PowerBI RS?

[muchinski]

I had some similar problem when I upgraded from preview version to GA. The solution in my case was recreate the report server database.