SAS install user not the same as original install user

[nhvdwalt]

Hi team,

I'm trying to apply a hotfix to a SAS 9.4 M2 installation on Linux.

The SDM fails with the below error:

"WARNING: The current user (abc123) is not the same user that last installed to this SAS Home location: null"

It seems like the SDM is not properly matching up the current user (abc123) with SAS Home, thus landing up with a abc1234 <> null situation.

Where/how does the SDM pick up the SASHome location and/or check that the userids are the same ? 

sdwpreferences.txt has the correct SAS Home directory. It's not impossible that the current user is not the original install user, but I need to see what the SDM is picking up as the orgininal user to determine.

Any ideas ?

Thanks,

Nico.

[JuanS_OCS]

Hi @nhvdwalt, Nico.

The error you refer is documented into http://support.sas.com/kb/39/320.html

You do need the same user as previously used during the installation. Probably a username such as sas or sasinst. It is a requirement in Linux. Reason is simple: the user-group-others permissions model on Linux.

FYI: you can run again the SDM/SDW with the paramenter -loglevel 2, to increase the information, but my best guess/advise is to run the installation as the correct user and, in case you cannot, to contact SAS Technical Support.

[nhvdwalt]

Hi team,

Thanks for the replies.

@JuanS_OCS, thanks for the tip on loglevel 2. Unfortuantely it didn't give any more useful info.

I agree it might be a user id mismatch, but I need to prove the theory. There are only three possible userids and I've tried them all, no difference.

Now, I not saying it is, but......

We have six servers. On 4 out of the 6, the hotfix was ok, on the 2 others, $SASHOME/deploymntreg/registry.xml is practically empty whereas on the other 4 servers there is plenty of info in the file. There are also a couple of registry.* files on the working servers that are missing on the faulty ones.

Unfortunatly the system is up at the moment, else I would have copied the files across to at least test the theory....

Throughts ?

[AnandVyas]

If it's a Linux System, is the UID for Installer Account same on all the servers? That's a pre-requisite I guess on Linux machines.

you can check using the command:
id <user-name-of-the-installer-account>

on all the servers.

Hope this helps!

Thanks,
AV

[nhvdwalt]

Thanks @AnandVyas, id command yields the same UID across all 6 hosts.

[AnandVyas]

Hi @nhvdwalt

That's quite an interesting question.
I tried to search this but only thing I was able to figure out was as soon as you launch the SDM Wizard, an init script is ran in the background which checks system properties like user ID, user home directory, OS family etc. that's where I guess it figures out the install account.

Do post back here if you are able to figure out the same.

Thanks,
AV

[Kurt_Bremser]

Do a ls -l on the SASHOME directory to see which user it belongs to.

[nhvdwalt]

Thanks @Kurt_Bremser, belongs to the user I'm running with.

[Kurt_Bremser]

Just to be absolutely sure, also run this:

cd /sashome
find . ! -user abc123

Only three files should be found, elssrv, sasauth and sasperm

[AnandVyas]

Wow, @Kurt_Bremser that's cool one added to my list!

Thanks!

[Kurt_Bremser]

And the icing on the cake is this:

# ls -l `which find`
-r-xr-xr-x    1 bin      bin           56816 Aug 19 2016  /usr/bin/find

Just run a "man find", and you'll see what can be accomplished with just 56 K of binary (AIX 64-bit).

MS would need at least 56M for that. And several times the runtime.

[nhvdwalt]

@Kurt_Bremser....No way, that's a cool trick 🙂

It returned those files....elssrv, sasauth and sasperm as you mentioned. So confirmed, all files belong to the admin user as expected.

[Kurt_Bremser]

---

@nhvdwalt wrote:

@Kurt_Bremser....No way, that's a cool trick 🙂

---

Maxim 15: Know your playing field. In this case, UNIX and its utilities.

😉

[alexal]

@nhvdwalt,

It appears that registry.xml have been corrupted or modified, I would like to see an output from the following command:

grep install_user /<SASHome>/deploymntreg/registry.xml

[nhvdwalt]

Thanks @alexal, no need. Below is the entire file.....

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<Registry version="3"/>