ConfigMgr Reports Prompts for a Password

Out of the blue my web reporting for ConfigMgr started prompting for a password and no matter what account you entered it would be rejected. If you cancelled the prompt you would receive an access denied error. My reporting site was setup properly with all of the correct prerequisites as it had been online for a couple of years. Nothing seemed to work – no recent patches had been installed, logs were clean, permissions looked correct, IISRESET didn’t nor did a system reboot. Reports would also work fine from a local session on the site server. After much digging I finally came across a post on the TechNet forums that resolved the issue. Here are the steps that helped resolve the issue:

·         Open IIS Manager and navigate to your SMS_Reporting site

·         Click on the site and select Authentication under IIS from the main screen

·         From the Action pane select Providers

·         Ensure the NTLM is listed and it is at the top of the list

·         Open a command prompt and run IISRESET

After that I could access reports locally and from a remote session. All the more reason to migrate my ConfigMgr reporting to SQL Reporting Services.

PXE test request failed, status code is -2147467259, Error receiving replies from PXE server

Recently OSD on my primary site server stopped working – but only when connecting via PXE. If I was using an existing boot disk, I could connect and start the imaging process. The PXE control log had the following entry over and over:

“PXE test request failed, status code is -2147467259, Error receiving replies from PXE server”

I assumed that the Windows Deployment Services Server (WDS) service had stopped and all I had to do was restart it and it would start responding to PXE requests. I was correct on one thing, the WDS service had stopped however when I tried to restart the service I got a very similar error in the event viewer as references in this forum post:

Log Name: System
Source: Service Control Manager
General: The Windows Deployment Services Server service terminated unexpectedly.  It has done this 2 time(s).  The following corrective action will be taken in 600000 milliseconds: Restart the service.

Log Name: Application
Source: Application Error
General: Faulting application name: svchost.exe_WDSServer, version: 6.1.7600.16385, time stamp: 0x4a5bc3c1
Faulting module name: wimgapi.dll, version: 6.1.7600.16385, time stamp: 0x4a5be09a
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0000000000032a8e
Faulting process id: 0x1338
Faulting application start time: 0x01cbfecfb154f4f3
Faulting application path: C:\Windows\system32\svchost.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\system32\wimgapi.dll
Report Id: f089f975-6ac2-11e0-9ddc-005056970055

After rebooting the server the same error was logged and WDS would not start. Even after removing the boot image from my distribution points and then adding them back - WDS would still not start. I tracked them problem down to recent driver addition to the WinPE boot image. It looked like when ConfigMgr was recompiling the WIM file it corrupted the image. To resolve this issue I did the following:

·         Remove the boot image from all distribution points (monitoring the distmgr log file)

·         Removed all drivers from the WinPE image

·         Added all our drivers back to the image and allowed it to recompile

·         Added the boot image back to the distribution points (monitoring the distmgr log file)

·         When everything had replicated successfully I was able to restart the WDS service