If a client connects to a UNIX or Linux server using SSH and launches SAS® 9.2 and tries to access Help or display HTML results, a dialog box will open stating that the connection to the remote browser server has failed. This will occur even if the remote browser plugin has been installed and is running on the client.

The process that is launched from the SAS session to serve the Help or HTML content makes use of the DISPLAY environment variable to determine where the remote browser server will be listening. For SSH connections with X11 forwarding, the DISPLAY variable will have the form localhost:12.0 instead of containing the DNS name or IP address of the client.

There are several easy workarounds:

1. Before launching the SAS session on the server, define the DISPLAY variable explicitly:

   prompt> export DISPLAY=the.client.name.com:0
   

2. From the SAS session, submit an OPTIONS statement that defines the HELPHOST option:

   options helphost="the.client.name.com" ;
   

3. Add the following lines to the script !SASROOT/bin/sasenv_local:

   if [ -n "$SSH_CLIENT" ] 
   then clientip='echo $SSH_CLIENT | awk '{print $1}'' 
   SASV9_OPTIONS="-helphost $clientip" 
   export SASV9_OPTIONS 
   fi 
   

Operating System and Release Information

Product Family	Product	System	SAS Release
			Reported	Fixed*
SAS System	Base SAS	64-bit Enabled AIX	9.2 TS1M0
		64-bit Enabled HP-UX	9.2 TS1M0
		64-bit Enabled Solaris	9.2 TS1M0
		HP-UX IPF	9.2 TS1M0
		Linux	9.2 TS1M0
		Linux for x64	9.2 TS1M0
		OpenVMS on HP Integrity	9.2 TS1M0
		Solaris for x64	9.2 TS1M0

* For software releases that are not yet generally available, the Fixed Release is the software release in which the problem is planned to be fixed.

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If a client connects to a UNIX/Linux server using SSH and tries to access Help from a SAS® session, it will fail

Type:	Usage Note
Priority:

Date Modified:	2009-04-13 18:49:15
Date Created:	2008-12-11 13:33:21