Category: SAS Software

Reviewing Installed SAS 9.2 Software and Hotfixes

If you’ve ever needed to review which SAS® software components have been installed on your SAS servers and clients, as well as know which hotfixes may have already been installed, then you will be interested in SAS Usage Note 35968: Using the ViewRegistry Report and other methods to determine the SAS® 9.2 software releases and hot fixes that are installed.

The usage note provides instructions detailing how you can use a Java-based SAS utility (sas.tools.viewregistry.jar) to generate HTML and text reports (DeploymentRegistry.html and DeploymentRegistry.txt) of the installed software and hotfixes. With SAS 9.1.3 I used to manually maintain (error-prone) spreadsheets with this information, so I am very happy to be able to automate it with SAS 9.2 and get reliable information.

Now that you have this information the next logical step would be to determine which hotfixes haven’t been installed, but might need to be, then download and install them…

Well, the even better news is that SAS Institute also provide the SAS 9.2 Hot Fix Analysis, Download and Deployment Tool (SAS92HFADD). SAS92HFADD is another utility that compares the currently installed hotfixes against a freshly downloaded list of currently available hotfixes for the software you have installed. It generates an HTML analysis report listing all of the appropriate hotfixes together with links to the list of issues, install instructions and download for each hotfix. It even adds annotations to those hotfixes that require a bit more attention because they have dependencies or post-installation instructions (like rebuilding and redeploying web apps). As well as the report you also get a script to download all of the hotfixes and another script to silently install them all. I was very impressed. I think I’m going to like using this utility :)

One thing that tripped me up when I first tried to run SAS92HFADD (because in my excitement I skimmed over the instructions too quickly), was that you need to manually run ViewRegistry to get a DeploymentRegistry.txt file to drop into the SAS92HFADD directory. It would be great if a future version did this automatically. I’d also be quite keen to see it all managed from a central admin console that reaches out to all the SAS servers and clients in an organization to collect this information and optionally push out selected hotfixes. Perhaps this could be a suggestion for the SASware Ballot?

For those who run SAS software on Windows Server 2008 R2, you might run into the same User Access Control issues I did, so I’ll do a follow up post specifically on using ViewRegistry and SAS92HFADD on Windows Server 2008 R2.

SAS Web Report Studio In-Process Scheduling Port Allocations for Lev1, Lev2 …

Today I was installing SAS 9.2 with the latest 4.3 web apps on Linux 64-bit (from a very new 920_11w03 depot). After successfully setting up a Lev1 environment I then went on to create a Lev2 environment (on the same machine). All was going ok until I got to the page in the SAS Deployment Wizard where you choose the SAS Web Report Studio: In-Process Scheduling Ports. This is what it looked like:

These ports (7570, 7571, 7572) looked very familiar. Checking my notes I saw that they were the very same ports from the Lev1 configuration. This was odd because I had specifically selected Lev2 in an earlier page and although all of my other ports were automatically incremented for a Lev2 environment (e.g. 8561 to 8562, 8591 to 8592 etc.) these ports were the same as the Lev1 ports.

This sounded like a recipe for a port clash so I needed to pick some alternative ports. I prefer to stick with standard well-known ports for SAS where I can, so I went looking for resources. I spent a fair amount of time searching but I finally found what I needed at the bottom of the the following page:
SAS(R) 9.2 Intelligence Platform: Web Application Administration Guide, Fourth Edition > SAS Web Report Studio Administration > Configuring SAS Web Report Studio > Modify Port Numbers for In-Process Scheduling in a Clustered Environment

The SAS document explains that SAS Web Report Studio 4.3 has 30 ports available in the range of 7560 to 7589. The defaults ports for Lev1 are 7570, 7571 and 7572 (as I saw in the installation) and incrementing blocks of 3 can be used for other levels. i.e. Lev2 would use 7573, 7573 and 7574 and so on. Based on my experience above I assume these assignments haven’t made it into the SAS Deployment Wizard as yet.

It is also possible to set the ports after the installation from with the SAS Management Console as explained at the end of the SAS document.

Armed with this info I drew up the following table I can refer to with future installations:

  In-Process
Scheduling
Port 1		 In-Process
Scheduling
Port 2		 In-Process
Scheduling
Port 3
Lev 1: 7570 7571 7572
Lev 2: 7573 7574 7575
Lev 3: 7576 7577 7578
Lev 4: 7579 7580 7581
Lev 5: 7582 7583 7584
Lev 6: 7585 7586 7587
Lev 7: 7588 7589 7560
Lev 8: 7561 7562 7563
Lev 9: 7564 7565 7566
Lev 0: 7567 7568 7569

You might notice in the Lev7 row that the third port drops down to 7560 rather than incrementing to 7590. I did this because the documentation suggests the range is only 30 ports from 7560-7589. I haven’t yet tried using a port outside that range to see what happens (I don’t know if WRS validates the port number before it uses it).

Now I have my Lev2 port numbers I can carry on with my installation.

Updated SAS Admin Docs (inc Portal Promotion)

I noticed that several of the SAS® platform administration documents have been updated recently following the release of the 4.3 versions of SAS Enterprise Guide and the various mid-tier web apps (SAS Information Delivery Portal, SAS Web Report Studio, SAS BI Dashboard etc.). The updated documents include:

SAS® 9.2 Intelligence Platform System Administration Guide, Second Edition
PDF available from http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/bisag/64088/PDF/default/bisag.pdf
HTML viewable at http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/bisag/64088/HTML/default/viewer.htm
SAS® 9.2 Intelligence Platform Web Application Administration Guide, Fourth Edition
PDF available from http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/biwaag/63149/PDF/default/biwaag.pdf
HTML viewable at http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/biwaag/63149/HTML/default/viewer.htm
Administering SAS® Enterprise Guide 4.3
PDF available from http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/enclient/62806/PDF/default/enclient.pdf
HTML viewable at http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/enclient/62806/HTML/default/titlepage.htm

Of particular interest is an extra chapter in the SAS 9.2 Intelligence Platform: Web Application Administration Guide, Fourth Edition about the new facilities for Promoting Portal Content (Chapter 24).

New DI Admin Course from SAS

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.

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.