[Rd] Question about Rweb

[Ted Byers]

Hi Simon,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Simon Urbanek [mailto:simon.urbanek at r-project.org]
> Sent: October-05-11 5:07 PM
> To: Ted Byers
> Cc: 'Tonidandel, Scott'; r-devel at r-project.org
> Subject: Re: [Rd] Question about Rweb
> 
> Ted,
> 
> On Oct 5, 2011, at 4:00 PM, Ted Byers wrote:
> 
> > Hi Simon,
> >
> > Any chance of getting step by instructions on setting it up to work
> > with a web server like Apache's httpd server (I have Apache's web
> > server running, actually a couple instances on different ports, and I
> > do all my CGI programming using Perl)?
> >
> 
> The setup is really easy (it supports either CGI or PHP), but you're on
the
> wrong platform :P see below.
> 
Actually, I haven't had much choice with regard to platform.  I presently
work in a Windows only shop.

> [snip]
> > On http://rforge.net/FastRWeb/files/, I read that FastRWeb is to be
> > installed using
> > "install.packages('FastRWeb',,'http://www.rforge.net/')",
> > but that gives me the following message:
> >
> >> install.packages('FastRWeb',,'http://www.rforge.net/')
> > Installing package(s) into 'C:\Users\Ted\Documents/R/win-library/2.12'
> > (as 'lib' is unspecified)
> > Warning message:
> > In getDependencies(pkgs, dependencies, available, lib) :
> >  package 'FastRWeb' is not available
> >>
> >
> > This was on:
> >
> > R version 2.12.0 (2010-10-15)
> > Copyright (C) 2010 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing ISBN
> > 3-900051-07-0
> > Platform: x86_64-pc-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
> >
> 
> Well, technically, you can run it on Windows, but I would not recommend
it.
> Windows is a really bad server platform, especially with R (no fork, no
parallel
> connections, no unix sockets ...).
> 
Yes, I know it's limitations, but at present I have no option but to deal
with it.

> The standard configuration in FastRWeb assumes a unix server (the more
> common case) and it really consists of install.packages() and then copying
> Rcgi from the cgi-bin directory of the installed FastRWeb package to your
> web server's cgi-bin and starting Rserve (via /var/FastRWeb/code/start).
> Alternatively, you can use the PHP client from Rserve instead of CGI.
> 
> If you really want to use Windows, I have fixed the Windows build so it
> should work, but you'll have to configure it by hand -- but as I said, I
strongly
> discourage the use of Windows for any R-related server activities - there
are
> too many security implications and it's far less efficient.
>
;-)

I have the machine that will be doing the real work behind several layers of
security.

How do I modify the command
""install.packages('FastRWeb',,'http://www.rforge.net/')"," so that it uses
RTools to build it for Windows?

Thanks

Ted

PS: I may have a machine soon to set up with Linux (the OS on that machine
crashed, got corrupted, so I'll have to wipe its disk and install de novo.
Is there a preferred distribution of Linux you can recommend (one for which
I can download DVD disk images so I can burn install DVDs on one of my
Windows boxes, or are they all pretty much the same?