Just noticed over on sascommunity,org (http://www.sascommunity.org/wiki/SAS_Global_Forum_Proceedings) that they have posted scanned copies of all the papers from SAS Forum (SUGI) all the way back to 1976!
Wonder how many people who presented in 1976 are presenting at SAS Forum 2011 in Vegas?
If you are let me know.
When installing the SAS PC File server it defaults to using port 8621.
But if you have the SAS Stored Process server installed in SAS 9.2 it also uses port 8621.
So when trying to start the SAS PC File server as a Windows services it won’t start.
To change the port, open the SAS PC File server via the Desktop Start menu Shortcut.
Was about to type this up in full but found a SAS Support note instead 
Doing some research on the new SAS Addin for Microsoft Outlook 4.3, to trouble shout an issue at a customer site (more on that later) when I came across this post on the SAS Support site.
It describes a way to change the default content storage options so that when a user saves a document vis the SAS Addin for Microsoft Office, the conent is automatically available via the SAS portal.
I am a great fan of creating content once and making it easily available to as many users as is useful, via their preferred channel. This is a great technique to help with that approach.
Had an interesting experience with the new SAS 9.2 environment at a customer site.
We have got SAS 9.2 (actually SAS Grid but thats irrelevant for this post) installed on RedHat 5 Linux. As we are using Linux and not Windows we lose the standard integration with Active Directory. We didn’t want to implement PAM integration with AD (mainly because nobody can articulate clearly all the steps required to get it working).
So we were left with Host authentication. As we only had a few users in this phase thats not so bad, but as we have a few servers (i.e Grid) I really wanted a easy way to avoid creating userid’s on each server.
Aha I thought Ill use internal SAS user id’s and then get the user to inherit a trusted/host user id to run the SAS processes.
So I setup the user in Metadata with an internal id, made sure they didn’t have a standard user identity (i.e username/pwd against DefaultAuth). Also assigned the user to be a member of SAS General Servers (to inherit sassrv, planned to change this when it worked) and for extra fun added a OraAuth with a username/pwd for the Oracle DB and assigned the user as a member of that as well.
So into DI Studio and Information Map Studio as the user using the internal userid/pwd and:
Now connect using EG 4.3 with same internal userid/pwd and:
mmmmm talk to helpful onsite SAS installer, he could get it to work by adding DefaultAuth in the EG connection in the Auth Domain field. Ok try that and yip all good. So carry on testing.
mmmmm get a could not access Auth Domain.
So into some more tesing, worked out you can type what ever you ant in the Auth Domain connection to get this behaviour (i.e x would do the same as DefaultAuth).
As you do we tried all the combinations we could think of, and no cigar. So helpful SAS installer logged tech suport track and just go this back.:
Followed the distructions and wahoo we have lift off.
So it looks like you can’t use the standard Username/Password authentication method if you want to use internal userid’s/passwords and EG 4.3.
But SAS Token Authentication does work.
Now to test all the other options to see if this change effects anything else, oh the joy of testing …..
Just noticed Chris has posted an entry outlining a new hotfix for Enterprise Guide 4.3.
Details are here: http://ftp.sas.com/techsup/download/hotfix/HF2/C44.html#C44006
Because nobody has decided to disrupt the market and make oodles of disk space available at little or no cost.
I can now purchase a 1tb external hard drive for about NZD $99. This is for the disk and the external drive inclosure.
I can get a dropbox account with 2GB of disk storage free. But its USD $20 a month for 100GB, so $2,400 a year for 1TB
I can buy Rackspace files at USD $150 a month for 1TB (@ 15 cents a GB), so USD $1,800 a year.
Mozy.com will cost me USD $5.99 a month for 50GB or USD 9.99 for 125GB, again USD 1,000 ish for 1TB
Or even worse I can get a web hosting account with 5GB for NZD $60 a month (ok it is in NZ!).
NZ backup specific sites will do 10GB for NZD $90 a month, a whopping NZD $108,000 a year!
So yes I know there needs to be fail over (ok so NZD $200 for two 1tb disks) and people and additional hardware and traffic and redundancy, and redundancy and a bit more redundancy (its like the fact we have to say backup 3 times in a row before making changes .
But you still have to say there is an opportunity for somebody to make the hosting of raw data more of a commodity. (or at least host a dropbox server in NZ so I dont get whacked with international traffic charges for uploading and downloading files!)
I did think about why google doesnt offer free storage (aka extend their gmail concept) perhaps its because its harder to show ads to generate revenue as you put the files there and don;t really touch them again unless needed. And also not so much valuable information to mine like there is in emails and website logs.
So what has this got to do with SAS, not a lot.
BUt if you think about it, lots of people always go on about how expensive SAS is. But if there were cheaper alternatives, wouldn’t people buy them and SAS go under (or at least stop the constant year on year growth?)
I while ago I posted about remembering to tick the box for outlook integration when installing AMO 4.3.
Barry commented that you dont see that tick box option when you do an upgrade from a previous version of AMO.
Angela has just posted a way of adding it after the fact over here Super Important Tip on Upgrading from 4.2 to 4.2 Add-in to MS Office
(mental note to self, given this hidden executable and the EG migration wizard, really need to spend sometime one day clicking on all the .exe’s and see what else is hidden!)
Well the New Zealand SAS User group (SUNZ) is over for another year, with over 250 people attending last Thursday.
The presentations will be up soonish, but mine is up early here “Delivering Data Quality in the Real Word – A case study using SAS Dataflux”
The main theme I got from the conference was the move in topics from accessing and managing data in previous years to the concept of Business Analytics, which is obviously a theme that is being replicated world wide.
One of scariest presentations was from Sue at New Zealand post about their Genius system (they have actually made sas.com fame! @ New Zealand Post works with SAS® to create Genius™). Its scary because they can derive so much insight about a person and their expected behaviour from all the information they have access to (and of course the power of SAS).
Just lucky they don’t have access to internal Google, Facebook or Twitter data I suppose!
Ill let you know when all the preso’s are up on slideshare.
Had a weird one this week.
SAS are installing a Grid environment at a customer site.
We had already installed the SAS 9.2 clients on a dedicated Citrix box, so the dev team could test the new SAS 9.2 clients / functionality.
We wanted to add a few clients, including the Enterprise Miner 6.2 client (we aren;t installing a websever so can’t use the web based java client).
So ran the install wizard, selected add additional software and then selected Enterprise Miner client. Install wizard went through ok and completed succesfully.
But there was no Enterprise Miner shortcut on the start menu, and if I clicked the em.exe I got nada.
After a bit of tooing and froing, the answer was to run the install wizard, do a planned deployment and only select the client tier and then Enterprise Miner.
Thing that is confusing is that Enterprise Guide, Management Console, DI Studio etc all installed ok via the add additional software option.
Just not Enterprise Miner (and no error messages of course).
I won’t rant about the fact that although a lot of the SAS products/client interfaces all finally share the same infrastructure components, user interfaces and functionality (im loving shared prompts), a number of them are stil orphans in this regard (why oh why doesnt EM use std metadata connection profiles like every other SAS client!)
But if you do find that you manually install Enterprise MIner client and it just doesn’t, try a planned deployment.
We always recommend to customers that they create two user ids for the SAS Administrators.
One that is granted standard user rights(or developer user rights) and one that is granted administrator rights.
(remember nobody should use sasadm should they!)
The reason is that it stops the administrator users from accidentally doing something they didn’t mean to when in the SAS environment (like delete a workspace server definition), as they will be using their normal account login.
When they need to do something gnarly they use their Administrator login and believe me when I say it does put you in a different head space.
(again your not using sasadm are you!, and we also don’t recommend shared admin user accounts, you need to be able to trace changes back to the admin user who did them)
In SAS 9.1 you were forced to created to host userid’s or Active Directory userid’s for each admin.
In SAS 9.2 you can use a dual account technique outlined here.
Its a short article so copied it here to save me one click later when I need it again.
To enable someone to alternately function as an administrator and as a nonadministrator, create two user definitions for that person as follows:
Dual users log on with their internal account when they need administrative privileges and with their external account the rest of the time.
Note: The only way to make someone a dual user is to give that person two user definitions, each based on a different account. You can’t create a dual user by adding a login to a definition that already has an internal account or by adding two logins to one definition.
Note: Dual users should use a dedicated client-side connection profile for their internal account. In that profile, the user should leave the Authentication Domain field blank. This optimizes credential reuse.
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