A recent SAS Communities post got me thinking about running SAS Management Console using WSL2. In that post, the questioner was asking about how to manage multiple SAS environments with different SAS 9.4 maintenance levels (M5 and M8) from a single client device. I posted that one of the ways to do it was to run SAS Management Console remotely, as each SAS environment will have the corresponding SAS Management Console version installed. One of the ways to do this, when the SAS server is on Linux, is to use X-Windows software for Windows (like MobaXterm). Behind the scenes an SSH session is used to connect to the server and run SAS Management Console using X11 forwarding so that the app appears locally on the Windows workstation. I regularly encounter SAS customers using MobaXterm to do this and I occasionally use it myself when on Windows (my primary desktop is Linux so I normally just use SSH with X11 Forwarding without any additional software). It also occurred to me that, with recent enhancements to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), you can now do this with native Windows features and don’t need any additional software. I set out to try it for myself. Continue reading “Remote SAS Management Console using WSL2”
Author: Paul Homes
SAS 9.4 M8 Java 11 and CORBA
Recently I was trying to run some custom Java code using the latest SAS 9.4 M8 libraries with Java 11 and ran into a unexpected exception:
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/omg/CORBA/Object
This was a surprise as CORBA underpins the SAS 9.4 IOM servers and their APIs (like the SAS Metadata Server and SAS Workspace Server). My code worked fine with SAS 9.4 M7 and so I assumed it must be related to the switch to Java 11 in SAS 9.4 M8 and there must be a way to get it working again.
I searched up Java 11 and CORBA, and as one often does, landed on a StackOverflow page: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13517497/java-lang-noclassdeffounderror-org-omg-corba-interfacedef
One of the answers Continue reading “SAS 9.4 M8 Java 11 and CORBA”
SAS Management Console: My Favourite SAS App
SAS® Management Console is by far my favourite SAS application. As a SAS platform administrator I like it because I can use it to administer much of the SAS 9 platform. I also like that I can use it to reach into, query and update SAS metadata in the SAS Metadata Server. My favourite interaction with SAS Management Console though is as a software developer and in this post I’ll explain why.
Way back in the mid 2000’s, when SAS 9.1.3 was the most recent version, I discovered SAS documentation for a SAS Management Console plug-in API and it spurred my imagination. Even with the best of applications there are always ways they can be improved, from one-off organization specific requirements to generic everyone-could-use-these features. The developers and designers of SAS Management Console, right from the early days with SAS 9.1, had planned for it to be extended with a documented API for adding custom functionality directly into the SAS application. I imagine this started from internal SAS requirements but I was very happy it made it into external documentation for us to use too. That was of course where Metacoda Plug-ins started. It’s amazing to think that I’ve been working with this application and it’s plug-in API for over 15 years.
What sort of things does the SAS Management Console plug-in API support? Continue reading “SAS Management Console: My Favourite SAS App”
SAS Management Console 9.4 M8: omitoolsmc requested Woden
After a recent installation of SAS 9.4 M8 I needed to refresh the SAS clients on a Windows installation. I did an Upgrade-in-Place (UIP) for those clients which updated my SAS Management Console 9.4 M7 installation to 9.4 M8. When I started SAS Management Console 9.4 M8 to test it I encountered the following error:
Clicking the Details button revealed more info: Continue reading “SAS Management Console 9.4 M8: omitoolsmc requested Woden”
SAS Documentation Feedback
SAS Documentation is a wonderful resource. I have spent lots of time reading and searching through it, learning new things, refreshing existing knowledge, or trying to work out why something I am doing is not working. Very rarely you might encounter an error, as I did yesterday whilst reading about the changes in the recent SAS 9.4 M8 release. SAS have made it very easy to provide feedback when you encounter such things – up in the top right hand side of the page there’s a Feedback link, as highlight in the screenshot below:
Clicking on that link will open your email client and pre-populate a ready made email with the title of that page in the subject line and a link to the page in the body. All you need to do is provide your comments and hit send.
I was very impressed with the response to the feedback I provided yesterday. Reading my email this morning I already had replies and the documentation had already been updated too. How fast was that!