Duplicating the ReportServer virtual directory
I watched a guy—who doesn’t work with me but works for another company—today try to duplicate a SQL Reporting Services ReportServer virtual directory by saving the existing one to a file using standard IIS methods and creating a new one. There’s a decent enough reason for doing this, but that doesn’t matter.
The process failed spectacularly. Reporting Services kept complaining that it couldn’t find the <server path>/REPORTSERVER/bin folder. The solution? Remove the newly created folder, use the Reporting Services Configuration Tool to generate a fresh one, and then run an IIS reset (thanks, Bruce, for the tip with the IIS reset). This fixed everything—the new report server folder worked perfectly, and the original one remained untouched and continued functioning correctly.