I am currently in Chapter 8, page 248 and i'm trying to test the Excel services unattended service account. I have followed all step by step instructions up to this point.

I'm using a named instance for the ssas server. Because a named instance uses a dynamic port for listening, I had to set it to a static port, but it works. When I try to connect to the analysis server from excel, I get this error message: The following system error occurred: The requested name is valid, but no data of the requested type was found

For server, i'm using serverad1\ssas:[port#]

Id is [domain]\sp_excel

I've googled for answers but have not found anything useful yet. Any suggestions would be helpful.

Ok, here's an update.

I found an article that listed different ports to unblock. I've now opened 1433 and 1434 for sql server, and ports 2382 and 2383 for the browser, and i'm getting this error message: "the following system error occurred: a connection attempt failed because the connected party did not respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because host has failed to respond

I went to the firewall settings and just shut the whole thing down. Went back to excel and it worked. Obviously, it's a firewall issue but I don't know what else to do with it. Is there another port to unblock?

Any suggestions?

Another update:

I installed SSMS on my client machine, rather than remoting into the server. I was able to connect to the DB engine, but not the AS, as I expected.

Again, I turned off the FW and I was able to connect to the AS with no problems. I turned the FW back on and it failed again. Obviously it's a firewall issue, but I've unblocked the ports it says to unblock. What else is there that could be causing this?

thanks.

I finally figured it out. I turned on the firewall log and had it log all the dropped requests to see what's NOT coming thru. I found that port 49179 was blocked and getting tcp requests. I unblocked that port and it works fine now.

Maybe I was supposed to unblock that port in another step and I missed it, but it's working for now.