[R] Tunnelling X for R graphics

[Dylan Beaudette]

On Saturday 31 January 2009, Erik Iverson wrote:
> Dylan,
>
> Can you confirm that you've done that before while tunneling R graphics
> over ssh?  I thought I'd tried and screen and failed with a similar message
> when using graphics as Adam had.  I could be wrong though.

Ack. Maybe I spoke too soon. I haven't encountered the error before and 
*expected* screen to take care of connection problems... However I cannot 
confirm that it would work for your case... Sorry!

Dylan

> Dylan Beaudette wrote:
> > Try starting your R session after starting a 'screen' session. Like this:
> >
> > $> screen
> > $> R
> > # do stuff, when taking a break do CTRL-A D to disconnect
> > # use as normal
> >
> > See the man page for screen, it is basically a terminal multiplexer
> > that can gracefully accommodate connection failures. If you get
> > disconnected, re-connect, and then re-attach the screen process:
> > $> screen -r
> >
> > and you should be ok.
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Dylan
> >
> > On 1/31/09, Adam D. I. Kramer <adik at ilovebacon.org> wrote:
> >> Dear colleagues,
> >>
> >>  	I run R on a few different machines, and view graphs and the like by
> >> tunnelling X through SSH to my local machine. This is useful for me
> >> because my local machine can't easily handle some of the data sets I
> >> work with.
> >>
> >>  	However, when an ssh connection dies, the tunnelled X session also
> >>
> >> dies, which breaks R's device connection, generating this error:
> >>> Error: X11 fatal IO error: please save work and shut down R
> >>
> >> ...that's kinda scary, so I quit(save="yes") and then run R again.
> >>
> >>  	The problem, and maybe I'm just whining here, is that because the
> >> data sets are large this takes several minutes where I'm basically just
> >> sitting around.  This happens once every other day as the VPN software
> >> I'm using "times out" after about 24 hours and thus the ssh session
> >> dies.
> >>
> >>  	I can't really guess at why a broken X session would corrupt a
> >> running session of R so severely that it would need to be completely
> >> restarted.  Can anyone explain this to me?  Or perhaps (hopefully)
> >> someone has enough knowledge of the X11 device to be able to tell me
> >> that I can ignore this message, and just use dev.off() and then
> >> X11("localhost:10") to open a new working X11 connection?
> >>
> >> Cordially,
> >> Adam Kramer
> >>
> >> ______________________________________________
> >> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> >> PLEASE do read the posting guide
> >> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented,
> >> minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
> >
> > ______________________________________________
> > R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> > PLEASE do read the posting guide
> > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented,
> > minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.



-- 
Dylan Beaudette
Soil Resource Laboratory
http://casoilresource.lawr.ucdavis.edu/
University of California at Davis
530.754.7341