Hello,

I am posting this in case somebody finds this information useful. I
did not come across this solution anywhere, so it might help somebody
out there.

We had the following situation:

- Access to the cubes using the Microsoft PivotTable component in a
web page.
- A W2k3 IIS 6.0 box, using msolap.asp and the data pump scheme with
msmdpump.dll.
- A W2k3 SQL Enterprise Ed. / AS box, with SP3a installed
- Both machines in same domain
- Anonymous (also tried with Basic) authentication in IIS using a
domain account which was included in the roles that had access to the
cubes.

This setup worked fine with one W2k3 box, but didn't work at all when
we tried to have the msolap.asp pump.ServerName property point to
another AS box (also W2k3). We checked all the configuration
parameters, but the problem was always the same: the msmdpump.dll
library was unable to open a named pipe to the AS box (we determined
this using Sysinternal's Filemon.exe tool). The result was that the
user's Internet Explorer was apparently "frozen", as it waited for a
response from the web server.

After checking all the configuration settings that might be causing
the problem, we found out that just by enabling the MS File Sharing
service in the SQL/AS box made all work fine.

I had read in this MS paper:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en...l_datapump.asp

that the msmdpump.dll used NetBIOS to establish the named pipe, and we
apparently had NetBIOS enabled. Using a network sniffer we found out
that the packets between the IIS and the AS were actually using SMB.
But SMB uses port 445 and apparently we had it correctly enabled in
the W2k3 AS box that didn't work.

In the end, enabling the MS File and Printer Sharing Service in the
SQL/AS box did solve the problem. I don't know, however, if there is a
more secure method of solving this, since I am aware of the potential
problems related with having SMB/NetBIOS enabled.

I hope this is helpful to somebody else!

Regards,
---
Marcelo Soria Rodríguez