With SAS^® 9.4M5 (TS1M5), you might encounter slow connection times to PI Servers when you run a LIBNAME statement under Linux to connect to PI servers. 

This problem occurs because of the way that SAS checks the authentication method. The PI System Web API supports the authentication methods listed below (in addition to the SSL certificate check):

• None: No user name or password is required.
• Basic: A user name and password are required (This method is currently not implemented for this engine).
• Kerberos: Kerberos or GSS authentication is used.

By default, the SAS engine checks the authentication methods in the following order until a valid method is found: none, basic, Kerberos. This behavior might cause significant delay (10+ seconds) while you wait for the denial for methods that are not supported.  

Click the Hot Fix tab in this note to access the hot fix for this issue.

Post Hot-Fix Instructions

To avoid the performance delay, you can set the SAS_PI_WEB_AUTH environment variable if you know that your PI Web API server requires Kerberos authentication.

For example, if your site uses Kerberos as the authentication method, you can set the SAS option as shown here before running the LIBNAME statement:

Or, you can add the line below to your sasenv_local file:

This SAS_PI_WEB_AUTH environment variable is available only for SAS 9.4M5 with this hot fix installed and for SAS^® 9.4M6 (TS1M6) and later versions.

Operating System and Release Information

Product Family	Product	System	Product Release		SAS Release
			Reported	Fixed*	Reported	Fixed*
SAS System	SAS/ACCESS Interface to the PI System	64-bit Enabled AIX	9.43	9.44	9.4 TS1M5	9.4 TS1M6
		64-bit Enabled Solaris	9.43	9.44	9.4 TS1M5	9.4 TS1M6
		HP-UX IPF	9.43	9.44	9.4 TS1M5	9.4 TS1M6
		Linux for x64	9.43	9.44	9.4 TS1M5	9.4 TS1M6
		Solaris for x64	9.43	9.44	9.4 TS1M5	9.4 TS1M6

* 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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A fix for this issue for SAS/ACCESS Interface to the PI System 9.43 is available at:

https://tshf.sas.com/techsup/download/hotfix/HF2/D3W.html#64004

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With SAS® 9.4M5 (TS1M5), you might encounter slow connection times to PI Servers when you run a LIBNAME statement under Linux to connect to PI servers. The hot fix enables you to set an environment variable SAS_PI_WEB_AUTH="Authentication-method" to reduce the connection time.

Type:	Problem Note
Priority:	high

Date Modified:	2019-05-20 15:43:28
Date Created:	2019-04-09 11:04:59