Where do I place a FAVICON.ICO file for SQL server reporting services 2008?
I can find information on the web for 2005 (IIS root and restart IIS) for 2008 R2 (ReportManager directory below RS install and restart service) and 2012 (same as 2008 R2?) but none of these seem to work for 2008.
To restate the question, if you are not using IIS where is the webroot on a server with SSRS 2008?
The favicon won't have anything to do with SSRS by itself, as long as it is in the website's root folder most browsers will automatically retrieve it. The only other way to add the favicon is through adding a <link> tag to the <head> portion of the web page but I do not believe you can modify the report manager website to that extent.
Make sure that you've placed the icon in the actual root of the entire website and not just the root folder of the report manager since it usually maps to http://reportserver/reports/ instead place it in the actual webroot which, as far as I know, the default for IIS is c:\inetpub\wwwroot\
Update: I was unaware that SSRS 2008+ no longer required IIS. That is interesting.
From 2008 onward SSRS uses http.sys to serve HTTP requests so that it doesn't require IIS. This means that you are severely limited in the ways you can configure it. This forum post on MSDN Social seems to imply that you cannot put anything in the web root unless you have IIS. This this blog article gives a lot more information about http.sys and how it works.
MSDN does have a page about configuring the kernel mode driver http.sys and reserving url namespaces. But these all talk about forwarding the request to the SQL server anyway, so I'm not sure if it would be much help.
You could try changing the virtual directory that SSRS serves from to the webroot itself and place the favicon.ico file in the \Reporting Services\Report Manager\ folder but I'm not sure that will work and I can't test it at the moment.
Of course the easiest solution is to just install IIS and use it. Then it will be simple to add the favicon.ico to the proper location.