Tag: Ubuntu

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”

SAS 9.3 Framework Data Server (and the missing license)

Whilst troubleshooting why my SAS 9.3 Framework Data Server wasn’t starting I discovered that, unlike Foundation SAS where the license (a.k.a. SID or setinit) is applied once a year, the SAS Framework Data Server requires the presence of a setinit.sas during every start up. Mine had been deleted. I’m not 100% sure how that came to be but I suspect it was probably one of two things: Continue reading “SAS 9.3 Framework Data Server (and the missing license)”

Running SAS on Ubuntu Linux: Dash to Bash

It happened to me again today … the Ubuntu dash-bash-default-shell-thing:

userid@hostname:~$ /opt/sas92/SASFoundation/9.2/sas
/bin/sh: 0: Illegal option -p
userid@hostname:~$ /opt/sas93/SASFoundation/9.3/sas
/bin/sh: 0: Illegal option -p

I encounter this every now and then. This time I was upgrading my notebook and it’s Ubuntu 64-bit installation to 12.10 and restoring SAS 9.2 & 9.3 installations from backup.

Several years ago the default shell symlink of /bin/sh to /bin/bash was changed to /bin/dash in Ubuntu. You can find out more about the reasoning behind Ubuntu’s switch from bash to dash here – it caused quite a bit of discussion when it happened.

The often suggested fix is to manually change the /bin/sh symlink, but there’s also a command to do it (which also fixes the associated man page symlink too):

Continue reading “Running SAS on Ubuntu Linux: Dash to Bash”

SAS & JBoss: Too Many Open Files

I’ve been seeing some ‘Too many open files‘ exceptions in the SAS® mid-tier JBoss logs on my Ubuntu Linux server. I was surprised about this because I remember during installation I had followed the guidance in the SAS documentation and increased the nofile limit. It turns out that verifying the ulimit from a normal console/ssh login was not sufficient, I should have also verified it from an su based login too.

These were the sorts of messages I was seeing in the JBoss logs:

2012-03-11 09:22:38,463 ERROR [org.apache.tomcat.util.net.JIoEndpoint] Socket accept failed
java.net.SocketException: Too many open files
...
2012-03-11 08:57:19,454 ERROR [org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext] Error reading tld listeners java.io.FileNotFoundException: /opt/jboss-4.2.3.GA/server/SASServer3/work/jboss.web/localhost/SASBIDashboard/tldCache.ser (Too many open files)
...

There are some Pre-Installation Steps for JBoss for both SAS 9.3 and SAS 9.2 that should be followed during installation to avoid these errors. These were the instructions I had followed, but as you’ll see in a moment, it wasn’t quite enough for this (unsupported) Ubuntu installation.

The instructions specify to edit the /etc/security/limits.conf file directly. Rather than editing this main config file, where the settings might get forgotten or lost during an upgrade, I placed the settings I required for my SAS installation in their own dedicated config file: /etc/security/limits.d/sas.conf

# Increase the open file descriptors limit from the default of 1024 to 30720 for JBoss running web apps for SAS 9.2/9.3
* - nofile 30720

I knew that this had taken effect because I logged in, via ssh, to verify it as the sas user (I run JBoss as the sas user). Checking the ulimit I saw the following:

sas@server:~$ ulimit -Hn;ulimit -Sn
30720
30720

With nofile at 30270, how was it I was still getting ‘Too many open files‘ errors? After a quick session on Google I found a blog post suggesting the increased limits will only apply if the pam_limits PAM module is enabled.

Checking the /etc/pam.d/login file I could see the pam_limits line was already present and uncommented:
...
session required pam_limits.so
...

This made sense since the console/ssh login showed the expected numbers.

Google also led me to a stackoverflow question (how do i set hard and soft file limits for a non-root user at boot?). The answer provided there indicated that, for su commands, you also need to verify the pam_limits module is enabled in an additional su specific PAM config file, which on my machine was /etc/pam.d/su. My JBoss init script runs as root during system startup but uses su to run JBoss as the sas user. Looking in /etc/pam.d/su I could see that the pam_limits line was commented so perhaps that was the issue.

Before making the necessary changes, I verified the nofile ulimit for the sas user by running su as root:

root@server:~# su sas --login --command 'ulimit -Hn;ulimit -Sn'
1024
1024

Aha! It had the 1024 default rather then the increased value. It looked like this was indeed the problem. I uncommented the pam_limits line in /etc/pam.d/su and repeated the test:

root@server:~# su sas --login --command 'ulimit -Hn;ulimit -Sn'
30720
30720

It now shows the increased value as expected, so it looks like the problem’s fixed. I restarted JBoss and haven’t seen any ‘Too many open files‘ errors since.

Desktop Files for Launching SAS Apps on Ubuntu

Whilst I often use the command line on Linux, it’s also nice to have icons in the menus to start SAS® applications like SAS Management Console and SAS Display Manager. These days I mostly use GNOME Do as an application launcher (its a bit like Quicksilver for Mac OS X). Naturally I like to be able to launch SAS apps from GNOME Do too. One day soon I’ll give Ubuntu Unity another try, and when I do eventually make the switch I probably wont use GNOME Do any more (but I’ll remember it as good friend), so then I’ll want to launch SAS apps from Unity. Thankfully I can use the same custom .desktop files in all of these situations.

Originally I used to point and click my way through editing the menus to add a custom launchers for SAS apps, but I soon tired of that. I’m a programmer too. Pointing and clicking doesn’t stay fun for long ;)

I found out about .desktop files after delving into what happened behind the scenes when I was editing the menus using point and click methods. There’s a GNOME Dev Center tutorial on it “Desktop files: putting your application in the desktop menus“. The freedesktop.org site also has a list of the Recognized desktop entry keys that can go into a .desktop file.

Below are some of the .desktop files that I use to launch SAS applications on my Ubuntu installation. I have only tested these on Ubuntu using GNOME but, since they are standard freedesktop files, I imagine they should also work in KDE and other Linux distros.

If you place the .desktop files into the ~/.local/share/applications directory (e.g. /home/userid/.local/share/applications) they will only be available to that single user. Alternatively, if they are placed into the /usr/share/applications directory then they will be available to all users.

The nice thing I have found about editing .desktop files is, so far at least, the changes have shown up in the menus immediately (i.e. without having to logout/login). In my installation the menu entries for these .desktop files can be found in the Ubuntu Applications > Other menu. They show up in GNOME Do too.

Here are the .desktop files I use:

SAS Management Console 9.2

This is a sas-mc-92.desktop file that I use to launch SAS Management Console 9.2 on Ubuntu.

#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Name=SAS Management Console 9.2
Icon=/usr/local/SAS/SASManagementConsole/9.2/SMCApplication.ico
Exec=/usr/local/SAS/SASManagementConsole/9.2/sasmc

SAS 9.2 Display Manager

This is a sas-dms-9.2.desktop file that I (sometimes) use to launch the old SAS Display Manager System (DMS) interface on Ubuntu. If you’ve used DMS on Linux you’ll probably understand why I only use it sometimes ;). I’d love to have a native SAS Enterprise Guide like interface to SAS on Linux (without having to start Windows in VirtualBox). I know, given the numbers, it’s unlikely to ever happen, but I can’t help wishing nonetheless :).

#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Name=SAS Display Manager 9.2
Icon=/usr/local/SAS/sas-logo-48x48.png
Exec=/usr/local/SAS/SASFoundation/9.2/sas

You wont find the /usr/local/SAS/sas-logo-48×48.png file in your installation so you should substitute that with the path to an appropriate icon available in your installation.

SAS Management Console 9.1

This is a sas-mc-913.desktop file that I use to launch SAS Management Console 9.1 on Ubuntu.

#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Name=SAS Management Console 9.1
Icon=/usr/local/SAS/SASManagementConsole/9.1/SMCApplication.ico
Exec=/usr/local/SAS/SASManagementConsole/9.1/sasmc

If you are a SAS user on Linux then I hope you find these useful too. If you have any info/experiences to share regarding .desktop files launching SAS apps in other desktop environments (KDE, Xfce etc.) or other distros (RHEL, Fedora etc.) then please leave a comment.