Anonymous access in SQL RS 2008 - Part 2

Recently I received a few questions on Anonymous authentication. For anonymous auth in SSRS2005, I always had the question about how to give administrative permission to some users, while giving read permissions to the mass. Now I have my question answered. A duplicate RM/RS virtual directory was configured for anonymous authentication. Extranet users connect to the anonymous auth enabled vdir. Intranet users connect to the windows auth enabled vdir.

I am actually not 100% sure on the supportability of such deployments. But customers have found ways to do it. Unfortunately SSRS2008 does not allow you to create virtual directories. My suggestions was

"Unfortunately there isn't an easy alternative in SSRS2008. If you can afford to install a second instance and configure a web farm, you can make the second instance anonymous. Another solution is to create a front end application using the viewer control, and enable anonymous authentication there."

 I guess there are always some IIS configuration that we won't be able to support. However, anonymous auth seems to be a common request from customers. We do not want to make RS an all-purpose web server. I a still wondering what is the best way to support something like this ...

You can find the original discussion here: https://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3995702&SiteID=1

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 06, 2008
  Here is our dillema ... we provide a service management application to our customers and we have a web portal application for their customers to be able to see / log service calls.  That portal has reports of which SSRS was our primary reporting tool.  These customer's customers are outside of the environment running SSRS and our application as they are accessing this over the internet.  Without unanomyous access what is our option?

• Anonymous
  November 10, 2008
  The comment has been removed