Tag: SAS Installation

SAS 9.4 M8 … Some Surprises

SAS/IntrNet Hat Something I, and others, have been looking forward to for a while has been the release of SAS® 9.4 M8, and so I was excited to see Margaret Crevar’s SAS Communities post about it: SAS 9.4 M8 is now available!!. Chris Hemedinger also posted about it on the SAS Users blog: SAS 9.4 Maintenance 8 is available. I was keen to get stuck into the detail in the documentation: What’s New in SAS 9.4 Guide to Software Updates, January 2023 (SAS 9.4, Rev. 940_23w05), SAS 9.4M8 Is Released.

M8 is the latest maintenance release of SAS 9.4 and I have heard several times how it will help alleviate some of the uncertainty around the future of the SAS 9.4 platform by extending Standard Support for SAS 9.4 for another 5 years (until 2028) and, as Chris mentioned in his post, “… demonstrate the commitment of SAS to support users of the SAS 9.4 platform for many years to come.”

I find the fastest way to review the M8 changes is to search for “M8” in the large PDF documents rather than reading through each individual web page:

In my reading, Continue reading “SAS 9.4 M8 … Some Surprises”

Useful SAS Viya 4 Kubernetes Resources

This is a quick post to list a bunch of resources I found useful in understanding and deploying SAS® Viya® 4 on the Kubernetes platform:

Overview
Installation
Migration
Management/Monitoring
Backup/Restore/DR

Thanks to all the authors for sharing their knowledge and experiences with us.

If you know of any others you think I should read and add to this list then please let me know in a comment below.

SAS Viya 4 (2021.1.2) with LDAPS to Windows 2012 R2

I recently installed a local copy of SAS Viya 4 (2021.1.2) in our Kubernetes lab environment and was trying to configure it to work with a test AD server, Windows 2012 R2. The AD server had been configured to only allow TLS (LDAPS) connections and so after the initial installation of SAS Viya I configured the SAS Identities service to use LDAPS, as explained in the SAS documentation.

Unfortunately it didn’t work at first. I was getting errors that turned out to be a TLS cipher mismatch between the client (SAS Identities service) and the server (Windows 2012 R2 AD). I was able to fix it using two methods:

  1. Re-enabling LDAP connections to AD and switching back from LDAPS to LDAP connections for the SAS Identities service (not preferred)
  2. Tweaking the configuration of the SAS Identities service to support a cipher that worked with Windows 2012 R2 AD (preferred)

Of course I could have also upgraded AD from Windows 2012 R2 to a more recent version, but that is a project for another day as I still want to continue working with the older version for the time being.

For future reference, and in case it helps anybody else, here are my notes Continue reading “SAS Viya 4 (2021.1.2) with LDAPS to Windows 2012 R2”

Installing SAS Viya 4 (2021.1.2) Locally

I have been wanting to get SAS® Viya 4 running locally on our lab hardware to further investigate the REST APIs, and having just finished the installation, I thought I’d jot down a few notes.

SAS Viya 4 has initially been released for the main cloud providers: Microsoft Azure (AKS) first, and now Amazon (EKS) and Google (GKE) too. I understand that RedHat OpenShift support will be coming later this year.

I’d heard it was also possible to get it running in a local on-premise Kubernetes (K8s) environment with some prep work Continue reading “Installing SAS Viya 4 (2021.1.2) Locally”

Checking a SAS Setinit/License in Metadata

When I apply a new SAS license (setinit) each year, sometime I forget to also update it in metadata. I might not even remember until I get an email from the SAS platform itself:

From: SAS Platform
Subject: SAS Product Expiration Notification
To: Me
Your license for SAS product name on sas.example.com has expired. Please contact your on-site SAS support personnel to obtain your updated setinit information.

“on-site SAS support personnel” … hey that’s me! I feel embarrassed that I forgot … again!

So, what if you want to be a bit more proactive and double-check whether you have an up to date SAS setinit in metadata? Continue reading “Checking a SAS Setinit/License in Metadata”