SharePoint Permissions for Reports

Aaron Bangasser — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 06:42:28 +0000

We are running MOSS 2007 with integrated reporting services. I was frustrated that I had to give users a lot of permissions to run a report. In fact they could easily delete reports. After a whole bunch of trial and error I found I could create a SharePoint custom permissions level with these settings that lets users view reports and create subscriptions but not delete reports:

List Permissions:
Edit Items
View Items
Open Items
Create Alerts
View Application Pages

Site Permissions:
View Pages
Use Remote Interfaces
Use Client Integration Features
Open

Here’s a great Microsoft post with more information:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb326286(SQL.90).aspx

I broke SQL!

Aaron Bangasser — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 02:06:41 +0000

At the SharePoint 2010 Conference Burzin Patel had some great tips for optimizing SQL 2008 on Windows 2008 64-bit Server. He recommended using an NTFS allocation unit size of 64k on drives hosting database files. I checked our test server and sure enough it was using a much smaller allocation unit size. No problem I thought, I’ll move the temp db’s to a different drive, format using 64k and move the tempdb’s back. Unfortunately for me I used the alterdb command and used a bad path (e: versus e:\). When I stopped and tried to start the SQL service it wouldn’t start:

Event 5123 CREATE FILE encountered operating system error 5(Access is denied.) while attempting to create the physical file ‘e:datatempdb.mdf’.

I searched online for an answer and tried starting the server with minimal config, etc. Nothing worked. Then I realized that that information about the TempDB is stored in the Master database. This was a test server and nothing had changed since the last backup. I restored the Master database to a different SQL server instance as MasterRestored and after it completed detached the database. I then renamed the broken SQL files master.old and master.ldf and copied the restored master.mdf and mastlog.ldf files over to the broken SQL server. I started the instance and it worked!

Now that I fixed the issue I still have to change the allocation unit size. Unfortunately, I’m out of time. Check back for those results.

Lessons Learned:
Always backup the master database before making changes to the SQL configuration!

The Blog of Aaron Bangasser

SharePoint Permissions for Reports

I broke SQL!