SSAS– Resolving Target Machine Actively Refused

I’ve always wanted to get my hands on SSAS, SSIS and SSRS as I’ve often felt shorthanded in these areas. Yesterday I decided to play around with one of these and get my hands dirty – SSAS. A few months ago I created a virtual lab on my 4 year old Dell Laptop with 3 VMs and about 4 instances of SQL Server – 2 on the Host machine and 2 on the Guest. One of them has SSAS installed on one of the named instances.

With great anticipation, I tried connecting to SSAS – it was unsuccessful!! I got an error message that says – A connection cannot be made to redirector. Ensure that ‘SQL Browser’ service is running. (Microsoft.AnalysisServices.AdomdClient)

As usual, I Googled the problem and it lead me to the connect item filed by Aaron Bertrand ( Blog | Twitter ). Reading through the post, I came to understand that if I try to connect to the named instance SSAS it’s possible that I will get this very error. I also renamed my machine hence this error showed up with the named instance.

Workaround: As suggested in the comment section, I granted NTFS permission on the program files (x86)\microsoft sql server\90\shared\asconfig folder for the SQL Browser service account and it worked!!

Reference: Microsoft Connect ID 679792

photo credit: JLaw45 via photopincc

—Hemantgiri S. Goswami (https://www.sql-server-citation.com)