Tunnelling X for R graphics

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.

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