Paul Homes blogging on SAS® platform administration topics
As a (certified) SAS platform administrator I often get asked how best to prepare for the SAS Certified Platform Administrator 9 exam.
I don’t have a magic formula other than study and experience. My standard response is to direct people to the best place I know where you can find out more: that’s the SAS support page specifically about exam preparation.
From my own experience I’d recommend the following steps:
When testing Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA) based client connections to SAS® platform servers, it is well worth checking the SAS logs to verify the connections are being made the way you expect. SAS has a variety of methods up it’s sleeve to get you authenticated, including cached credentials, retrieving stored credentials from metadata, SAS token authentication etc. Looking in the SAS server logs will help you identify the connection/authentication events and methods used. In the past I’ve thought I was using IWA+Kerberos but when I looked in the log it was obvious I wasn’t! I think it’s essential when testing/troubleshooting a new IWA configuration to review the SAS server logs for both failed and successful connections.
In a previous post “SAS and IWA: Two Hops” I mentioned how sometimes it’s necessary to force the use of Kerberos with IWA to be able to make IWA delegated connections to secondary servers. So here’s some examples of what we might see in SAS server logs Continue reading “SAS & IWA: Check the Logs”
Quick note from Paul: I’m really excited that platformadmin.com’s very first guest post is from the well known blogger and author Tricia Aanderud. I suspect you already know Tricia, but just in case you don’t …
Tricia Aanderud, president of And Data, Inc., provides SAS® consulting services to corporations who need assistance understanding how to transform their data into meaningful charts, reports, and dashboards. Tricia has been an enthusiastic SAS user since 2002 and has presented papers at the SAS Global Forum and other industry conferences. She is the co-author of two SAS BI books, “Building Business Intelligence with SAS: Content Development Examples” and “The 50 Keys to Learning SAS Stored Processes”.
Now over to Tricia …
I frequently find myself querying the metadata to assist with understanding a new customer system or trying to navigate one of my demo systems. As a result, I find I have many utilities that I want to share with customers. However, since these connect to the metadata with an active password, I don’t want to share my password. Using the SAS PWENCODE procedure, I can encode my password in a SAS program and voilà! a way to share the code and shield the password.
Encoding the Password
The PWENCODE procedure allows you to encode passwords that are used in place of plaintext passwords in SAS programs.
The following figure shows the PWENCODE procedure in a simple way. My example password, Pa55w0rd!, is placed in quotes. You can use different encoding methods, which you can read more about in the SAS PWENCODE procedure documentation.
The encoded password appears in the Continue reading “Password Encoding with SAS”
At the SAS® Global Forum 2012 last month I picked up a copy of “The 50 Keys to Learning SAS Stored Processes“, the latest book from the dynamic writing duo, Tricia Aanderud & Angela Hall.
As it happens, my partner Michelle also won a copy in a draw so we actually got 2 copies! We met Tricia and Angela in person too, and they kindly signed both books for us. Michelle is giving her signed copy away as a random door prize at our local SAS user group meeting (QUEST) later this month, so if you are in the vicinity of Brisbane at the end of May Continue reading “New Book: The 50 Keys to Learning SAS Stored Processes”
Update 16Apr2015: The Effective Permissions Explorers discussed in this blog post were first made available in Metacoda Plug-ins V3.0 and further enhanced in Metacoda Plug-ins V4.0. Details of additional improvements coming in the next release, including export to HTML and CSV, are discussed in this more recent blog post: Getting Ready for SASGF15
Update 08Aug2012: The Effective Permissions Explorers discussed in this blog post are now available for testing. More information is available in this Metacoda blog post: Metacoda Plug-ins V3.0 BETA2 (with free Metadata Explorer & ACT Reviewer!)
This post is a sneak peek at a couple of effective permissions explorers that we are putting into the next version of our Metacoda Security Plug-ins. We’ll also be demoing these at the SAS Global Forum 2012 in Orlando next week, so if you’re attending please pop by and visit us.
One of the most common requests we had been hearing at Metacoda was about providing extra information for effective permissions with SAS® metadata security. Effective permissions will tell you exactly what permissions are granted or denied for a particular user on a particular object, taking into account all of the factors such as Access Control Templates (ACTs), Access Controls Entries (ACEs or explicit permissions), object inheritance paths and identity hierarchies. Effective permissions give you this information without you having to understand all of the rules that SAS software follows to work them out. Of course, I still think an understanding of the rules is essential knowledge for SAS platform administrators to help with planning and impact awareness but that’s another story. Attending the SAS Platform Administration: Fast Track course from SAS Institute is a great way to learn these rules.
Effective permissions can already be seen in SAS Management Console 9.2 & 9.3 through the Explore Authorizations tab (accessible to administrators via the Advanced button on any objects Authorization tab). This is a great feature and I can’t recommend it enough to people who are troubleshooting metadata permissions on a single object. What we were hearing was Continue reading “Sneak Peek at our new Effective Permissions Explorers”
