Resolving SSL Error Messages With Reporting Services

A couple people have left comments here about running into the following error in Reporting Services:

The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish secure channel for SSL/TLS.

There are a number of reasons this error can occur, so it will involve some digging to get to the root cause. Most of the problems revolve around a failure to verify the SSL certificate on the report server. You might see the error because:

• The name for the certificate does not match the name of the server
• The certificate has expired or is considered invalid.

A good way to troubleshoot is to browse to the report server with Internet Explorer (https://machinename/reportserver) and see if IE complains.

There are also some less obvious reasons the error might occur. For example, the system time might be incorrect - making it appear as if the certificate has expired (when it has not), or has not yet been created (a certificate from the future!). Set the clock correctly.

If IE likes the cert, there might be a configuration issue. The URL used by the Report Manager to communicate with the ReportServer is found in a file under the Report Manager directory by the name of RSWebApplication.config. Find the <ReportServerUrl> element and make sure the URL matches the name on the certificate (which will match the name of the server). Hint: using https://localhost/reportserver is not going to work.

If you are in an environment that does not require SSL, and you are 100% positive you want payroll reports to cross the ether in plain text, you can find the RSReportServer.config file in the ReportServer directory and set SecureConnectionLevel Value=”0”.

I’m sure this is not the exhaustive list, but hopefully it will help someone out.