does Studio UE work with proxy?

[pe243]

Having http/s proxy as the only means to communicate with outside world - does SAS work in such a setup?

many thank, L.

[RW9]

Sorry, to what purpose?  There is an offline version of SAS UE, it gets installed locally to a Linux image.  Then there is the version launched from Amazon cloud - never used that, but I assume its password protected, so proxy shouldn't matter.  So either way it shouldn't matter, unless this is not what you mean?

[pe243]

hi,

whatever purpose SAS requires, I don't know, updates maybe?

Again, it is simple - proxy is the only mean to go out.

I had a look, setting a proxy in the underlying OS(centos) off which SAS runs seem to have not effect on SAS.

Yes, local installation (I thought that was self-implying) not in the cloud.

thanks

[RW9]

Then no, unless you have a specific requirement to use the net, then you shouldn't need it.  From the product page:

https://support.sas.com/software/products/university-edition/faq/AWS_or_download.htm

Downloaded vApp	Amazon Web Services Marketplace
Requires that you install and run virtualization software, such as VirtualBox, VMWare Workstation Player, VMWare Fusion, or VirtualBox.	Amazon Web Services Marketplace manages the virtualization software for you. All you need is a browser.
After you have downloaded the vApp and installed the virtualization software, you do not need an Internet connection to run SAS University Edition.	You always need an Internet connection to run SAS University Edition on Amazon Web Services Marketplace.
You can access your data directly by using shared folders.	You must upload any data that you want to use to Amazon Web Services Marketplace. When you terminate your AWS instance, your data is deleted.
SAS University Edition is free.	SAS University Edition software is free on Amazon Web Services Marketplace. However, Amazon can charge you for usage of and storage in the instances you create. SAS University Edition is eligible for the AWS Free Tier, which is available to new users of Amazon Web Services Marketplace.

Downloaded vApp does not require internet for use.  Although I have no idea how the patching system (if there is one at all) works for that.

[Tom]

How is it that you want SAS UE to communicate with the outside world?

Are you asking can in install it on a machine that is on an internal network?  That should work fine as long as you can download the image from SAS.

Are you asking if someone from outside your machine can use your installation of SAS UE?  Not sure, but why would you do that.

Are you asking if the SAS code running in SAS UE can access external websites, say to download public use files from the internet?

That one I am not that familiar with, did you try it? But if not then perhaps you could just download the files first and save them to the shared folder for SAS to access.

[boemskats]

Hi L,

I was also curious to the answer to your question (that is, whether the HTTP server on the UE VM configured to only serve as localhost, or whether the port number / localhost hostname are hardcoded in any of the URLs, or whether the app does use relative paths properly and is reverse-proxyable). The answer is, yes it can be reverse proxied, and no there are no limitations in place requiring you to access it via localhost. Took me a couple of minutes, but it works perfectly well with a LetsEncrypt SSL certificate reverse-proxied to port 443, forwarding it from my local workstation to one of our demo servers:

Before I cover the config, to answer some questions below as to why you would want to do this. Having your own instance of UE, running on a machine separate from your laptop, can be very useful if your laptop sucks, or you have a Chromebook (very popular in education), or you don't want to spin up the VM for 3 minutes every time you want to use SAS. If you set this up (and secure it properly), it gives you the same benefit of being able to log on to your own instance of UE, and sit down and learn and try stuff without the 2-3 minute penalty of starting the VM up each time you want to do so. I would assume that SAS also have no issue with this, as otherwise they would have configured the webserver bundled with UE to only accept connections when it is addressed as http://localhost:10080/.

Here's how I did mine (although you may want to have a different config):

First I opened a reverse SSH tunnel from my local machine to the remote host (cloud.boemskats.com), so that any connection requests to cloud.boemskats.com:10080 were forwarded to my local machine on the same port.I used this to test whether the webserver allowed connections requested via a non-localhost hostname. This is the command I used:

/bin/autossh -M 0 -o "PubkeyAuthentication=yes" -o "PasswordAuthentication=no" -o "ServerAliveInterval 60" -o "ServerAliveCountMax 3" -o "GatewayPorts yes" -NR 10080:localhost:10080 cloud

(note I have cloud set up to use a key & as an alias in my ~/.ssh/config)

Then, I set up nginx as a reverse proxy to serve that port to port 443 on a different virtual host. This was my nginx config:

    server {
        server_name  ue.cloud.boemskats.com;

        location / {
                proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:10080/;
                proxy_http_version 1.1;
                proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
                proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
        }
        listen 443 ssl; # managed by Certbot
        ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/ue.cloud.boemskats.com/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot
        ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/ue.cloud.boemskats.com/privkey.pem; # managed by Certbot
        include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf; # managed by Certbot


        if ($scheme != "https") {
            return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
        } # managed by Certbot

    }

Hope that answers your question. I suggest you implement some kind of authentication, as I assume you don't want everyone accessing your instance of UE willy nilly!

Nik

[pe243]

thanks Nik, yours is a good one, that was gonna to be next thing I wanted to look into.

With regards to my question - I realize to some my question might have seemed bit vague, even though I said, along the lines something like "proxy .. to outside world - caching proxy, eg, squid ; for whatever purpose SAS might need it when VM(thus SAS) has no direct access to the Internet (SAS own updates maybe, anything else(?) I'd not know, I'm not a SAS user.

I thought I'd see if, from IT point of view SAS would be easy to introduce to students but I get the feeling that UE is one-sidedly meant for one person at home.