Yesterday, my buddy Amit Panchal and I were trying to get an x64 instance of SSRS joined to reporting farm, and had a bear of a time.

Because of issues I won’t get into here, we were trying to initialize the server in the “classic” way – meaning we had exported our encryption key from one of the other nodes, copied it to the new machine and were trying to apply it locally, ala:

RSKeyMgmt.exe -a -f C:\Keys.snk -p password!

We kept on getting the error:  The report server installation is not initialized. (rsReportServerNotActivated)

We spent a couple hours trying to troubleshoot this using RsKeyMgmt -j, trying the same thing in the SSRS config tool, and so on. Still, we had no luck.

On a lark, we re-exported the key from the same server as before, copied it over and tried again. It worked like a charm! Next, we tried the old key again, and splat, same error. Moral of the story is that it appears every now and then your key might get munged during the export and/or copy process.