I had not heard of R until very recently when I was asked to set up the ‘server’ interface to R on a box. Apparently a bunch of math dudes thought they were too smart for bc and wrote R… yeah, I dunno. Lots of parts of R seem like a reinvention of the wheel. R has it’s own packaging system, like CPAN, called CRAN. It’s a little frustrating to have cran, cpan, gem, and all these different different methods to install libraries. I’m glad debian is still taking to packaging them up in debs.

I had to rebuild the R packages from sid on etch as the binary packages were built against a newer version of libc. I did this by adding a deb-src line for sid to sources.list:

deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian sid main

And then apt-getting the source for each package and building it (dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot). This was a lot of work because of long list of build dependencies which I had to backport, build and install (including tcl/tk). When the dependencies for ‘r-cran-rserve’ were finally met I was good to go.

R has some cheesy imitation of tcp-wrappers built in. It’ll bind to 0.0.0.0 by default, but will drop connections from another host. Without even looking at the code I’m sure it’s crap, but you need to put “remote enable” in /etc/Rserv.conf, to disable this foolishness. This file didn’t exist out of any of the packages, but it’s just a flat config file. I won’t bother talking about the authentication infrastructure, except that it’s useless, and you should probably wrap this around ssl and certificates or whatnot if you care.

You can start Rserve with ‘R CMD Rserve’, but that’s a little lame. Or ‘/usr/lib/R/bin/Rserve’ which will probably need R_HOME defined (see next). There’s also ‘/usr/lib/R/bin/Rcmd Rserve’ which doesn’t need R_HOME defined.

Fatal error: R home directory is not defined
This isn’t a well written error. You need to export R_HOME=’/usr/lib/R’, not an actual home directory (not to be confused with the working directory either). I wanted to use runit but without recompiling Rserve it lacks an option to not fork.

setgid(1): failed.
apparently R has a system function that lets you run shell commands. you can use setuid/setgid in the config file, but setgid won’t work. I don’t know why.