SAS Hotfix Download Tool - Any use to anyone?

[Lenvdb]

Hi all

After my previous work journey as SAS Platform Admin, I found myself working in a company where no SAS Servers had internet access. It was a cloud based AWS platform, with no means to download Hotfixes. Most companies nowadays tend to remove all Internet Access, and access to FTP services from the SAS Servers in their deployment. Often leaving SAS Admins to have to justify why we should have FTP access. It becomes a very tiring, and exhausting battle of egos we have to fight over and over, with every new wave of management and change being ushered in.

So I decided to write this C# App, which makes it just a tad easier, running from a Desktop PC / Laptop on Windows 10.

I give you the PDF doc of the App I wrote. 

Would this be something of use, or of interest to the SAS Admins out there in the UK / World?

On my initial role as SAS Admin we had Internet access on one of our Compute Servers, which enabled us to download hotfixes. So we copied Deployment Registries in from other servers, did the downloads, and copied the hotfixes out to those servers again for deployment.

Nowadays this is no longer a done thing on most corporate platforms. Most IT managers look at us as if we landed from outer space when we tell them about the SASHF Download utility and our need to use these tools. I guess it messes with their Security strategies.

Please let me know your thoughts, workarounds in your environments.

[Sajid01]

Great work @Lenvdb . As per the PDF your work is a great tool.
The very same corporate security policies, that restrict internet access , make installing software not approved by the competent authority impossible. In a typical scenario a SAS Administrator definitely does not have  administrator rights on official desktop / laptop and cannot downlead and install anything.
My experience is that one can always submit a request to the appropriate teams (with justification) for download of the hot fixes and upon approval, they do fulfill the request.

Nevertheless you have done a great job.

[Nigel_Pain]

That's a great idea, although it wouldn't work for us as we can't download executables from our laptops/workstations either. Luckily, our Cyber team have created a different route for downloads. We have a Demilitarised Zone which is heavily firewalled from our corporate network and within that we have a staging server, from which FTPs and downloads will generally work. In order to copy the downloaded files back to our servers, firewall rules have been created to allow certain machines within the main network access to SMB file shares on the staging server. So we can copy the deployment registries to the staging server, run the SASHF utility from there and then copy the resulting downloads back. Slightly longwinded but it works for us. And beats the hell out of when we had to use a USB flash drive to copy to and from a standalone laptop where we ran the SASHF utility!

[Lenvdb]

Indeed Nigel. The DMZ area is a great safe way to do so, and ideally every organisation would benefit from having the understanding that SAS Admins need this and the use of their tools to do the work.

Kind regards