Best Practices for Ensuring the Integrity of Your System :: SAS(R) 9.3 Intelligence Platform: System Administration Guide, Second Edition

Allow Only the Metadata Server to Access Your Metadata Repositories

The MetadataRepositories and rposmgr subdirectories, which are located in the SAS configuration directory, are critical to the operation of your system. These data sets contain metadata that defines your servers, users, access levels, enterprise data sources, and data structures. They also contain metadata for resources that are created and used by SAS applications, including information maps, OLAP cubes, report definitions, stored process definitions, and jobs.

To safeguard the integrity of your system:

Never move, delete, modify, or directly read the data sets in the MetadataRepositories and rposmgr directories. These data sets should be accessed only by metadata server processes.
Do not place other files in these directories.
Maintain a daily schedule of metadata server backups, as described in Backing Up and Recovering the SAS Metadata Server.

Use Best Practices for Working with SAS Folders

The folders that appear in the Folders tab of SAS Management console are used by client applications to store business intelligence content and system information. Inappropriate renaming, deleting, or moving of these folders or their contents could cause client applications to malfunction.

When interacting with folders in SAS Management Console, be sure to follow the best practices that are provided in Working with SAS Folders. If you need to move or copy the contents of these folders, use the procedures that are provided in Promotion Tools Overview.

Use Usermods Files When Customizing Autoexec Files, Server Configuration Files, and Startup Scripts

If you need to customize a configuration file, autoexec file, or start-up script for a SAS server, do not directly modify the file or script. Instead, add your customizations to the corresponding file that is named server-name_usermods.cfg, autoexec_usermods.sas, server-name_usermods.bat, or server-name_usermods.sh.

Use of these files prevents your customizations from being overwritten when a new SAS release is installed.