In a previous post I’ve described a method for configuring Active Directory Authentication for SAS® on Linux (with realmd). One of the packages that’s installed is oddjob-mkhomedir. This package normally handles any requirement for auto-creating home directories for those AD users on Linux. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to get used by the SAS Object Spawner. I ran into this issue again today when logging into SAS Studio 4.2 as an AD user on the SAS Viya™ 3.2 platform. I wasn’t able to login because the AD user’s Linux home directory didn’t exist and hadn’t been auto created. After manually creating the home directory the login succeeded. I would rather get auto-creation working so I wouldn’t need to manually create home directories for each SAS user that was likely to use SAS Studio. Thankfully I was able to find a solution that I’ll describe in this post. Continue reading “Auto Creation of Linux Home Directories for SAS Users”
Tag: Authentication
Handy SAS Usage Note for Troubleshooting UNIX Authentication
Whilst troubleshooting why LDAP based users couldn’t authenticate against a SAS Metadata Server configured for host authentication, I found this handy resource: SAS Usage Note 39891: Using PROC PERMTEST to diagnose UNIX host authentication issues in SAS® 9.2. The server in question already had correctly functioning LDAP host authentication via PAM, it was just that the SAS Metadata Server wasn’t able to authenticate the LDAP users. The usage note helped me fix the problem by leading me to the SASFoundation/SAS9.2/utilities/bin/sasauth.conf file where I found it had methods=pw instead of methods=pam (must have chosen the wrong options at install time). I actually didn’t need to run PROC PERMTEST this time but the usage note contains clear instructions on how to when required. Interestingly PROC PERMTEST doesn’t seem to appear in the Base SAS® 9.2 Procedures Guide.