Author: Paul Homes

Record, Rewind, Replay

Sometimes you find yourself wanting to repeat a SAS® software installation or deployment with the same, or slightly different, options. Perhaps you want to start an installation again after realizing that you chose a wrong option the first time around. Maybe you want to test out a slightly different configuration. It might be that you are planning on doing multiple client installs, choosing exactly the same settings each time, and want to automate the process. For all of these reasons, you might be interested in the SAS Deployment Wizard’s ability to record an installation and replay it later. You might make the replay automatic and silent so there is no interaction, or you might just want to use the smart defaults from an old installation and make a few minor changes here and there.

It’s such a handy feature, that you might even decide to always record your installs, just in case you need them later.

For more information, have a look at the following SAS documents:

I’ve listed the SAS 9.4 documents above, but there’s equivalent documentation available for the earlier SAS releases too.

Here are a few examples:

1. Record a manual install/deploy:

/sasdepot/sas94ts1m0-rev940-13w30/setup.sh -record -deploy -responsefile /opt/sas94m0/sasdw-response.txt

If the response file already exists it appears to be overwritten without reading the contents. I haven’t yet found a way to get the SAS Deployment Wizard to read an existing response file, make changes and save an updated or new response file. If someone knows how to do this please let me know.

2. Interactively replay a previously recorded install/deploy, picking up defaults from the response file, and allowing changes to be made along the way (these changes are not saved in the response file however):

/sasdepot/sas94ts1m0-rev940-13w30/setup.sh -responsefile /opt/sas94m0/sasdw-response.txt

3. Quietly and non-interactively replay a previously recorded response file for automated install/deploy:

/sasdepot/sas94ts1m0-rev940-13w30/setup.sh -quiet -responsefile /opt/sas94m0/sasdw-response.txt

The SAS Deployment Wizard has several other options and modes that you might find useful, so check the documentation for more info.

If you have any extra tips for using response files with the SAS Deployment Wizard, please let me know by leaving a comment below.

Finding SAS Depot Release Numbers

Checking the detailed release number(s) for SAS® software in a depot is one of those things I do rarely enough that I have to look it up each time I need to do it. I know it’s in the depot somewhere, but I keep forgetting exactly where. This is the main reason for this blog post :).

One of the reasons I don’t check it that often is, once I’ve downloaded a depot, I rename the depot directory so it’s very obvious which release it is (e.g. sas94ts1m0-rev940-13w30). Of course this method only works if you don’t mix orders for different releases in the same depot, which I try to avoid. I do keep multiple orders in a depot when they are for the same release. Single release depots means more disk space and bandwidth, but I find it helps me more easily find the right depot for the SAS release I need (In testing our Metacoda software we use various different versions and maintenance releases).

Documentation for how to find out the full release number(s) can be found in the following SAS documents:

There can be multiple SAS software orders in a depot, and they could each be different releases, so there may be multiple soi.html files to review.

When I look in the <sas_depot_dir>/install_doc/<order_no>/soi.html file, I can see the release number for our newly downloaded SAS 9.4 depot:

Product: SAS 9.4 64-bits TS1M0, Rev. 940_13w30

Finally, if you find yourself in a position where you have multiple orders in a SAS depot and you want to extract an order out into it’s own depot, have a look at the Create a Depot by Using the SAS Deployment Wizard section of the SAS® 9.4 Intelligence Platform: Installation and Configuration Guide (or earlier versions).

Hotfixing a SAS Depot

I’ve been doing a few SAS® platform installations lately and I noticed in the documentation some neat enhancements in SAS 9.3 M2:

  1. The SAS Download Manager, in addition to downloading a SAS software depot for your order, also downloads specially selected hotfixes for the products in that depot.
  2. The SAS Deployment Wizard will then apply those downloaded hotfixes during installations from that depot (so you don’t have to manually apply them post-deployment).
  3. The SAS Deployment Wizard also provides the ability to refresh that depot by downloading additional, more recent, hotfixes. This can be useful if the installation/deployment is being done a little while after the depot was initially downloaded.

You can find a summary of these enhancements in the What’s New in Installation and Configuration for the SAS 9.3 Intelligence Platform section of the SAS® 9.3 Intelligence Platform: Installation and Configuration Guide.

Here’s an example of using the SAS Deployment Wizard to refresh a depot. First step is to select the “Manage this SAS Software Depot” action: Continue reading “Hotfixing a SAS Depot”

Favourite Papers from SAS Global Forum 2013

I’m back in Australia now after attending SAS Global Forum 2013 in San Francisco last week. As always it was a fantastic conference where I got to meet lots of other enthusiastic SAS users, see some great papers about SAS software (though I never seem to see as many papers as I originally planned), and spend lots of time in the demo hall. The demo hall is one of my favourite places. You can talk to SAS developers and product managers about what’s coming in the next major release of SAS (9.4). The demo hall is also where Metacoda (my company) had a SAS Alliance Member sponsor stand and got to show our latest Metacoda products. Meeting our customers from the other side of the globe is always a highlight of the conference for me.

These are some of my favourite papers from the conference. As you will see from the list, Continue reading “Favourite Papers from SAS Global Forum 2013”

Promoting SAS Security Metadata (in Custom Repositories)

Did you know that with SAS® 9.3 you can promote (export/import) SAS metadata packages containing users, groups, roles, and ACTs, just like you can with Jobs, Tables, Libraries, Stored Processes, Reports and Information Maps? I needed to do this myself a few weeks ago. I wanted to promote some groups, roles and ACTs from an existing SAS 9.3 M1 installation to a newer SAS 9.3 M2 installation. Security metadata can be exported and imported via a SAS package file (.spk) from special virtual folders under the top-level /System folder. These virtual folders are distinguishable from normal folders because they have white folder icons instead of yellow folder icons as shown below.

SAS Management Console Virtual Folders

You can find out more information about this feature, including a few considerations you need to be aware of, by reading the Promoting Security Objects and Server Objects sub-section of the main Promotion Details for Specific Object Types section in the SAS 9.3 Intelligence Platform: System Administration Guide, Second Edition.

My security metadata promotion was a little more complicated than normal because I was also promoting some security metadata located in a custom repository. I normally avoid using custom repositories as much as possible (preferring to store everything in the Foundation repository and partitioning content with folders and ACTs). This is especially the case for security metadata: I’ve found that security metadata in custom repositories, being less visible, tends to get forgotten until it gets rediscovered whilst troubleshooting tricky security problems. Helping a customer resolve such problems was the reason we made security metadata from custom repositories highly visible in our Metacoda Security Plug-ins. We have since needed to keep some security metadata in custom repositories for the purposes of development and testing of our software. This is the custom repository security metadata I was attempting to promote, but it took me a little while to find it in the virtual folders …. Continue reading “Promoting SAS Security Metadata (in Custom Repositories)”