Paul Homes blogging on SAS® platform administration topics
These are some of my favourite papers from SAS Global Forum 2012 last month. I didn’t to get to see as many papers in person as I’d originally planned; we were very busy at our Metacoda stand. So it was great that the papers had already been published before the event as I’d already read most of the ones I missed.
As you will see from the list below, Continue reading “Favourite Papers from SAS Global Forum 2012”
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”
My last post was about configuring additional Service Principal Names (SPNs) in Active Directory to support the use of Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA) in a SAS® platform installation that uses host name aliases in preference to physical host names.
When working on a SAS & IWA setup like this, I’d start by reviewing the currently registered SPNs for all of the SAS servers involved (as well as any other servers that might be accessed from a SAS server using IWA). This gives an idea of what SPNs might have already been added, which ones still need to be added, and potentially which ones might need to be removed.
This is the command I use Continue reading “SAS & IWA: Reviewing SPNs”
I’m quite keen on using host name aliases, rather than their physical host names, when referring to machines in SAS® platform installations. It does however mean a little extra configuration is required when using Integrated Windows Authentication. That is what this post is about: configuring Active Directory with additional Service Principal Names (SPNs) based on the aliases.
Host name aliases have several benefits over using physical host names. They can be easier to remember (e.g. sasmeta v.s. p106547). They can be easily redirected from primary environments to disaster recovery environments (e.g. sasmeta from p106547 to d106547) with no client reconfiguration requirements. They also allow host machines to be readily renamed if/when required with little or no changes to SAS configuration files, programs and/or metadata.
Whilst they have obvious benefits, Continue reading “SAS & IWA: Host Name Aliases and SPNs”
