[R-SIG-Mac] Question Regarding R, Mac OS X, and Proxy Servers:

[Kasper Daniel Hansen]

I am at a loss as to why this does not work anymore, I am sure other  
people will chime in on this.

But regarding the GUI/environment variables, "normal" apps on Mac OS X  
does not see the environment variables you define in (for example)  
~/.bashrc. The recommended way to do this (across all kinds of  
applications) is to create an environment.plist file. A quick Googling  
bought up this page
   http://www.astro.washington.edu/owen/AquaEnvVar.html
which i think is still current.

A more R-centric approach is to use
  R> Sys.setenv("VARIABLE" = "value")
  example: Sys.setenv("DISPLAY" = ":0.0")
which sets an environment variable from inside R. You could place this  
command in (for example) ~/.Rprofile which is a user-based startup   
script location for R. There is also a systems-wide Rprofile.

Kasper


On May 1, 2008, at 8:47 AM, Stranathan, Dan wrote:

> Hello everyone
>
> I have a R question for you. I am new to the wide world of all  
> things R and I am not a scientist or a programmer per se. I'm a  
> Systems Administrator trying to troubleshoot a network issue with R  
> - Specifically related to proxy servers.
>
> Background:
> My Institute has a Linus-based Squid proxy server that brokers all  
> http traffic through it. We have 2 versions of the proxy server. One  
> proxy server (used for 99% of our staff) requires the user to  
> manually type a password when prompted. Not all applications are  
> "smart" enough to understand a proxy can since it requires the 2-way  
> process of password negotiation, etc. Our 2nd Proxy server is  
> basically a "wide open door" to the Internet. Only certain managers  
> and the IT dept are allowed to use this proxy. It doesn't require a  
> password at all.
>
> As you may know, the main way to configure proxy settings in OS X is  
> via the System Preferences (the Network Pane has a tab for proxy  
> settings). You can also configure these settings from the Terminal  
> via the networksetup and systemsetup commands too. Both ways achieve  
> the same result. You can also configure your shell session to be  
> "proxy-aware" using the UNIX http_proxy variable in  
> your .bash_profile (I describe this more below)
>
> So far, both Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and 10.5 (Leopard) have worked  
> quite well with our proxy servers. In fact, all "proxy aware"  
> applications such as Safari, iTunes, WebDAV, etc work great (As long  
> as you know your password of course). Even the curl and wget   
> commands work from the Terminal with once the proper configurations  
> have been made.
>
> My R Problem:
> The GUI version of R 2.7.0 (and possibly earlier versions?) does not  
> work with our proxy server correctly. I have tried both of our proxy  
> servers (secure and open) and neither one will allow R to route out  
> to the Internet. Other apps like Safari, curl, etc have no problem  
> getting to the R update site (cran.r-project.org).
>
> Certain command line tools will not honor the Mac OS X global proxy  
> settings. When this happens I usually just add an environmental  
> proxy setting with the "export http_proxy=<my proxy server>" to  
> my .bash_profile, etc and I can get around this problem quite  
> easily. I stumbled across this because the R command line tools (in  
> Terminal and X11) were not honoring the Mac OS X global proxy  
> settings at first, so I had to implement the setting I just  
> described. It works great now. But... I still cant get the R GUI app  
> to peacefully co-exist with my proxy servers, regardless of how I  
> configure the Mac OS X GUI system proxy or the shell environment.  
> Here is the error I get in the R GUI window:
>
> Error in file(con, "r") : cannot open the connection
> In addition: Warning message:
> In file(con, "r") : unable to connect to 'cran.r-project.org' on  
> port 80.
>>
>
>
>
> If you can offer any suggestions I would greatly appreciate them!
>
>
> Thanks!
>
> -Dan
>
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