SAS Management Console 9.3 Configuration Manager: Where did everything go?

When I first saw the Configuration Manager plug-in in SAS Management Console 9.3 I wondered where everything had gone! As you can see in the image below the list only contained four items!

I was expecting to see a nice long list of items like there is in this screenshot from SAS 9.2 …

Surely something was wrong? I have to confess when I saw this the first thing I did was to go looking through my SAS 9.3 install logs looking for errors. I couldn’t find any … ??? Puzzled, I went back to the SAS 9.3 Configuration Manager plug-in to take a look at what was there. As it turned out I was a bit keen to go looking for errors because when I expanded the 3rd item, SAS Application Infrastructure, hey presto there were all the missing items I had been looking for. Not missing, just rearranged.

Mystery solved, feeling a bit red-faced though. I’m always telling people to check the logs but maybe sometimes its worth clicking around a bit first ;)

SAS Deployment Manager 9.3

I noticed the user interface for the SAS® Deployment Manager 9.3 has changed slightly.

Here is a screenshot from my “old” SAS 9.2 M3 installation:

… and here’s the screenshot from my new SAS 9.3 installation:

I’m guessing that the new hierarchical folder structure is going to allow for more tools to added.

Interestingly there’s a new Apply Hot Fixes item at the bottom of the list of tools. This new tool is also mentioned in the SAS 9.3 hotfixes area under Important Changes to Hot Fixes. Initially I wondered if this was going to replace the SAS92HFADD tool, but then I saw there’s a SAS 9.3 Hot Fix Analysis, Download and Deployment Tool (SAS93HFADD) that’s currently marked as Under Development. I really liked SAS92HFADD (I did a couple of posts about my experiences with it here and here), so I’ll be interested to see SAS93HFADD when it’s available.

The documentation for the updated SAS Deployment Manager is in the SAS Deployment Wizard and SAS Deployment Manager 9.3: User’s Guide which is available from a link at the bottom of the SAS 9.3 Install Center Documentation page. This is one of those documents that I don’t refer to often enough to always remember where to find it. I hope it makes it onto the very useful, all-in-one page SAS 9.3 Documentation by Title.

SAS Restricted Options on UNIX

In a tweet by Gordon Cox last month, I was reminded of the restricted options facility available with SAS® software on UNIX platforms. This is capability where an administrator can set mandatory SAS system options at multiple levels of granularity: globally, per-group, and/or per-user. The reason for this post is that I don’t look at the documentation for this very often and every time I do it takes me a while to track it down. I always think its going to be in the UNIX companion in the Base SAS area… but it’s not! That gets me every time. Instead it’s tucked away in the Configuration Guide for SAS 9.2 Foundation for UNIX Environments (PDF) in Chapter 2 – Restricted Options. You can find this document in the Install Center section of support.sas.com under SAS Installation Note 36467: Documentation for a SAS® 9.2 installation on UNIX.

The context of the tweet was that the restricted options facility is another mechanism whereby a default setting of the NOXCMD option for SAS platform servers could be overridden for a subset of trusted users or groups in a SAS platform installation. The NOXCMD option is discussed in an earlier post: NOXCMD: NO eXternal CoMmanDs!

A quick summary of restricted options:

  • SAS Systems Options under UNIX set by an administrator, that cannot be changed by a user
  • Processed in the order global, group, then user. The last instance of an option is the one that wins.
  • Global restrictions are read from the file !SASROOT/misc/rstropts/rsasv9.cfg
  • Group restrictions are read from the file !SASROOT/misc/rstropts/groups/<groupname>_rsasv9.cfg
  • User restrictions are read from the file !SASROOT/misc/rstropts/users/<userid>_rsasv9.cfg

On Linux (at least) I can use the command “id -gn <userid>” to find out the effective group name for a user, given their user id. For example, “id -gn sassrv” might generate “sas“.

In my SAS 9.2 installation on Linux, whilst everyone else is still constrained by the NOXCMD option, I can ensure that the SAS Enterprise Guide user Bob Baxter, who has a user id of bob, can still use operating system commands in the SAS programs he runs on the SASApp server, by creating the file /usr/local/SAS/SASFoundation/9.2/misc/rstropts/users/bob_rsasv9.cfg with the following contents:

-xcmd

Of course, this only applies to SAS processes launched and run as the requesting user. Whilst it can be used to override NOXCMD for specific users/groups using a standard workspace server, it cant be used to distinguish between different users on the same stored process server, since all users will share SAS stored process server processes running under a shared identity (like sassrv). In that situation directing the users to separate SAS application servers would be more appropriate. There is an example of this in Jim Fenton & Robert Ladd’s SAS Global Forum 2010 paper 311-2010: A Practical Approach to Securing a SAS® 9.2 Intelligence Platform Deployment

Thanks to Gordon for reminding me about the restricted options facility.