SAS Portlets, Widgets, Themes and Tutorials for sale

When you install SAS 9 Business Intelligence server, Data Integration Server, Analytical Server or a SAS Solution, you will find that there are now a myriad of log files produced that you should (yes you really should) monitor and archive.

Install multiple of the SAS components on multiple physical servers and log trolling is even more fun.

So I have started to document the location and uses of these logs at : A list of SAS 9 Log locations and uses

Its probably going to take a while to populate all the details, so if you know of something that already exists, let me know.

When you do a new SAS 9 install, there are a number of distinct user id’s that have to be created, which map to specific roles within the SAS 9 environment. While you can change the default usernames, it is recommended that you create and use these distinct user id’s rather than using a single (or combined) id.

The required user id’s are:
sasadm - The SAS Administrator user id should be created on your metadata server machine. This user has privileges to manage user accounts in metadata and administer the metadata server. The SAS Administrator has unrestricted access to the metadata and this user ID should be protected accordingly. This ID should only be used for the SAS Management Console application.

sassrv- The SAS General Server user id should be created on your server machines. You must make the SAS security group its default group. This account will be used by the object spawner to launch stored process servers. This account will need access to any OS resources required to run stored processes. The default configuration of the SAS 9.1 Intelligence Architecture creates this single account for load balanced, stored process server usage. Additional server accounts can be created to give different levels of access as required.

sasguest- The SAS Guest user id will need to be created on your metadata server machine. This user is a generic user account and should have the lowest level of security privileges. This user id is used by the SAS® Information Delivery Portal to log users into the public kiosk area.

sastrust- The SAS Trusted User will be created on the metadata server machine. Because this user ID is a trusted ID, SAS servers such as the OLAP server and mid-tier applications can use this ID to impersonate authenticated clients on the metadata server; that is, the servers can communicate with the metadata server on behalf of the clients. This is a highly privileged account and should be protected accordingly.

sasdemo- The SAS Demo User will be created on your metadata server machine. This user has permission to demonstrate the SAS software you have installed and to verify the configuration.

saswbadm- The SAS Web Administrator will be created on your metadata server machine. You need only create an account for the Web administrator if you will be installing web applications, such as SAS® Web Report Studio, SAS® Web Report Viewer, or SAS Information Delivery Portal. This user has permission to administer the SAS Web infrastructure.

This information was sourced from Sugi 29 - Paper 225-29

Top Deployment Considerations for the SAS® 9.1 Intelligence Architecture

Which also provides a great overview of how the whole SAS 9 environment hangs together, check it out.

Every now and again SAS issues a whitepaper with recommended best practice for administering your SAS9 environment.  There is a great whitepaper over at SAS Support titled:

Backing Up SAS Content In Your SAS®9 Enterprise Intelligence Platform - Considerations for Creating Backups of Your SAS Content

It outlines the best practice for backing up your SAS9 environment and covers the areas:

• metadata
• WebDav content
• SAS Data Sets
• SAS Scalable Performance Data Server (SPDS) files

It doesn’t include:

• Configuration files
• Backup software recommendations
• backup management processes for archiving and storage

As well as outlining the SAS tools available to backup up your environment it also provides a good overview of how all the technical components fit together and recommended back approaches.

If you ever want to know what is licensed on a SAS server you can run this little bit of code:

proc setinit;
run;

If you run it via a base SAS session. on the machine itself, it will display a list of licensed SAS product and their expiry dates in the log window.

If you are running this in SAS Enterprise Guide and don’t have show log automatically turned on, then you will need to view the log once the job has completed to see the details.

• Process Flow screen
• right click on the custom code node
• open log

If you are running multiple SAS Servers and running this via SAS Enterprise Guide then you will need change the workspace server to point to each server before you run it, to see what is licensed on each server:

• Process Flow screen
• right click on custom code node
• select server

And of course if your metadata server is on a separate server to your workspace servers then you can’t use SAS Enterprise Guide at all, so you will need to run it via a base SAS session on the machine itself.