Tunnelling X for R graphics
Indeed, I am running R in screen. That is the context in which this error occurs. The problem is that screen passes $DISPLAY as the $DISPLAY for the actual terminal. So when the ssh session dies, the X11 connection is broken. The REST of R works fine...which is why I use screen in the first place. My data is not lost, etc., however it tells me I need to save and quit immediately. That is my concern. --Adam
On Sat, 31 Jan 2009, 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
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