Category: General

Remote SAS Management Console using WSL2

SAS Management Console 9.4 for Linux running in WSL2

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”

Second Birthday

It’s PlatformAdmin.com’s 2nd birthday this week!

The past 2 years have gone very quickly I must say. I set out with a goal of writing a least 1 post every month. Not very ambitious I know, but realistic for me nonetheless! I’ve never been much of a writer. I’ve always been impressed by people who appear to write so well, and even more so by those that have the stamina and skill to author and publish a book. Maths, Science & Computers have always been my thing ever since way back in school and I have generally avoided writing unless I had to. I do remember reading a blog post by Joel Spolsky a while back where he said that “Writing is a muscle. The more you write, the more you’ll be able to write.” It sounded pretty reasonable to me. As a training course instructor I’ve always found that one of the great benefits of teaching was that I necessarily had to learn much more of the details for whatever I was teaching. I’ve found that the same appears to be true about writing publicly accessible blog posts. The fear of being asked tough questions or being challenged on topics turns into the pleasure of learning more!

Well, I’m pleased to say that Continue reading “Second Birthday”

Some PlatformAdmin.com Milestones …

My platformadmin.com blog has seen a few milestones of late:

  1. It had 1st birthday recently (boy that year went quickly!)
  2. … then, thanks to mentions from Waynette Tubs in the June edition of the SAS® Technical Report, and Andrew Ratcliffe in his excellent NOTE: blog, it saw a fair bit of extra traffic this month. The unique monthly visitor count for platformadmin.com topped 1000 visitors for the first time! I got especially geeky excited when I saw it hit 1024.
  3. … and finally, in a lesser milestone, the number of total spam comments deleted over the past year topped 1000 too – would have been happy not to have seen that milestone, but I guess it’s probably peanuts compared to what other blogs get :)

Thanks to all the readers out there, and special thanks to those that comment, tweet, retweet and say nice things about platformadmin.com on other sites/blogs too.

Happy SAS platform admin-ing to all.

Cheers
Paul

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.

PlatformAdmin.com now has a Blog Roll (and roll of rolls)

Thanks to Andy Ratcliffe for adding platformadmin.com to his blog roll on NOTE:.

This was a timely reminder for me to add a blog roll to this platformadmin.com blog, something I had been meaning to do for some time now, and so I was prompted to make a start on it. You can find the initial blog roll in the column on the right hand side of this page.

My intention with this blog roll is not to list every SAS related blog I read because there are already a few other better, more definitive blog rolls available. I will just add a few of my favourite ones, especially those where I have seen some platform admin related content in the past. The ones I am starting off by adding are:

  • NOTE: The blog of RTSL.eu: Andy Ratcliffe’s blog has a number of articles on architecture, admin, backup, DI, BI, OLAP etc.
  • real business intelligence for real users: Angela Hall’s blog is a veritable encyclopaedia of SAS BI related information useful for SAS platform administrators – not to be missed!
  • The SAS Dummy: Chris Hemedinger’s blog has many articles of interest to admins managing SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office installations.

If you are after a more complete list of SAS related blogs and RSS feeds I would also recommend the following:

… you might think of this as a blog roll of blog rolls! :)

BTW if you are daunted by the amount of SAS related information out there I would highly recommend Google Reader. I switched a few months ago and since then have been able to skim read a lot more resources, in a lot less time, from any device at hand (iPad, Android phone, MacBook, Linux notebook etc.) and being a web app all the devices are always in sync with each other. I’d be lost without it now.