Back in September I wrote about seeing some New Targeted Admin Courses from SAS. Today I saw that the list of admin courses has been further extended to add a new SAS Data Integration Studio: Administration course. There’s more information about this new training course, including the course outline, on the SAS web site at https://support.sas.com/edu/schedules.html?ctry=us&id=628.
Author: Paul Homes
SAS Metadata Backup on Windows 2008 R2 64-bit
I was trying to run a manual SAS Metadata Server backup (OMABAKUP) on Windows 2008 R2 64 bit today. It failed! I run metadata backups many many times so I was sure all the normal prerequisites were in place but this was the first time I had run one on Windows 2008 R2 64 bit … hmm … I remembered seeing a SAS usage note about metadata backups on Windows 2008 a week or so back. A quick search found SAS Usage Note 38869: What credentials are needed when running a SAS® Metadata Server backup in batch on Windows 2008. It described the error I saw in the SAS log perfectly!
The resolution was to Run as administrator. Even though I was logged in to Windows as an Administrator I still had to explicitly run the SAS program in an administrative context (it’s a Windows security thing). As mentioned in the usage note, this is also documented in the SAS® 9.2 Intelligence Platform: System Administration Guide, Second Edition, Chapter 11 Using the %OMABAKUP Macro to Perform Backups and Restores, in the section Ensuring Appropriate User Credentials.
So I had a SAS usage note describing the problem and the solution. The trouble was I couldn’t quite get the instructions in the SAS usage note to work for me. When I right click over the Command Prompt window (or a PowerShell window for that matter) I don’t get a Run as administrator item. What did work for me though was to right mouse click over the Command Prompt item in the Windows Start Menu, and click the Run as administrator menu item – here’s a quick screenshot to clarify.
That opens a Command Prompt window running in an administrative context so I could then change to the metadata server directory and run the backup:
cd C:\SAS\EBIEDIEG\Lev1\SASMeta\MetadataServer
MetadataServer.bat -backup
… a quick check of the SAS log shows everything worked as expected this time.
PlatformAdmin.com also available via SAS-X.com
This platformadmin.com blog is now available via the new aggregator SAS-X.com, along with many other great SAS related blogs. It’s well worth checking out. If you’re wondering how it’s different from sascommunity.org planet there’s a Q&A item about it at the bottom of the SAS-X.com about page.
SAS 9.2 Mid Tier Support for Windows 2008 R2
To date I had avoided Windows 2008 R2 because, until recently, it was not supported for the SAS 9.2 Mid Tier. I had read in SAS Installation Note 36616: SAS® 9.1.3 Service Pack 4 and SAS® 9.2 support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 that support for 2008 R2 was coming with the release of the version 4.3 mid-tier apps. Now that release has happened I checked back with the usage note to see if it had been updated and was pleased to see the following:
“The subsequent delivery, SAS 9.2 (TS2M3), Revision 10w46, is now available. This delivery includes the remainder of the 4.3 release, which is the SAS Content Server and SAS Web-based clients (for example, SAS Web Report Studio and SAS Information Delivery Portal).”
Something I also noticed at the bottom of SAS Note 36616 was a link to SAS Installation Note 40501: Java 6 Update 14 or later is required when you install SAS® 9.2 in the Microsoft Windows 7 or Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 operating environments. That note points out that for Windows 2008 R2 you also have to use Java 6 (rather than Java 5) and provides the following information on when Java 6 support started:
“Prior to SAS 9.2, Rev. 09w51, JRE 1.6 was not supported. In order to use JRE 1.6, you need to install SAS 9.2 09w51 or later.”
There is an explanation of the meaning of the revision number in SAS Installation Note 35627: Determining your SAS® 9.2 release. SAS 9.2 Revision 10w46 as mentioned in 36616 is more recent (being 2010 week 46) than SAS 9.2 Revision 09w51 mentioned in 40501 (which is 2009 week 51).
So it looks like I can try out Windows 2008 R2 now – as long as I also remember to use Java 6 and get SAS 9.2 Revision 10w46 or later. As a bonus I now understand SAS 9.2 revision numbers. :)
Resources for Solaris and Active Directory Integration
A while back I worked with a client to implement Active Directory (AD) integration for a number of Solaris containers that made up their SAS platform. The main benefit of this was to allow all of the SAS users to use their Windows (Active Directory) credentials, the same ones they use to log into their workstation in the morning, to get access to the SAS servers on the Solaris platform. This removed any requirement to manage local user accounts, across multiple Solaris containers, as they could all be managed in Active Directory by the people who usually manage accounts. It was not a trivial exercise – it required communication with several different groups, some changes to the AD server, population of UNIX attributes for users and groups in AD and configuration of the Solaris containers, however it was well worth the effort and I would definitely recommend it.
These were the main technical resources I found useful with implementation and troubleshooting:
- The starting point was the Sun document Using Kerberos to Authenticate a Solaris™ 10 OS LDAP Client With Microsoft Active Directory at http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features/articles/kerberos_s10.pdf.
- Scott Lowe’s blog, particularly the Solaris 10-AD Integration, Version 3 post at http://blog.scottlowe.org/2007/04/25/solaris-10-ad-integration-version-3/, provided additional information. That article, the other articles it links to, and the comments on those articles all proved useful, either in their own right or as sources for additional keywords/phrases for Google searches.
I hope you find them useful too.