On Tue, 2 Sep 2008, Keith Jewell wrote:
"Prof Brian Ripley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Tue, 2 Sep 2008, Keith Jewell wrote:
As possible help to others, and also as a request for comments on how I
might do things better, I describe how I've recently altered my system to
handle this.
I'm on a Windows Server 2003 network and the R installation is accessible
to
many others. Everyone has "read" access to all installation files, but
only
I have write access. I do _not_ have Administrator privileges on the
server,
so I cannot make/change registry entries.
R versions are in an R folder tree, which also holds the version
independent
library folder.
//Server02/stats/R
//Server02/stats/R/R-2.7.0
//Server02/stats/R/R-2.7.1
//Server02/stats/R/R-2.7.1pat
//Server02/stats/R/R-2.7.2
:
//Server02/stats/R/library
In each version I have edited /etc/Rprofile.site to include the line
.libPaths("//Server02/stats/R/library")
The "default" libraries (base, boot, class...) are installed into the
relevant version specific .../R-n.n.n/library/ folder by the windows
installer program (e.g. R-2.7.2-win32.exe).
Occasionaly, and after installing a new R-version, I update all the
downloaded libraries in the version independent
//Server02/stats/R/library/
folder with a simple update.packages().
HTH. Comments welcome.
Please read the rw-FAQ for more details and insight, especially in using
Renviron.site (here you want to set R_LIBS_SITE: see ?libPaths) and using
update.packages(checkBuilt=TRUE, ask=FALSE)
For example, my sysadmins have Windows R installed locally (via the MSI
installer), and then have on each machine in etc/Renviron.site have
R_LIBS_SITE=N:/R/library/2.7
R_LIBS_USER=P:/R/win-library/2.7
This allows both common packages and user-specific packages to be stored
on SMB-mounted drives. (N: is common to all machines, P: is 'personal' --
we use mapped drives rather than shares to allow quick changes of server)
There are two reasons we install locally. The first is performance: if 20
machines in a lab start R up simultaneously the network load is high. The
second is that our security settings (and I believe the defaults these
days) disallow use of CHM help on network drives -- we remove the chtml
directories from packages installed on R_LIBS_SITE, so R defaults to text
help for those packages.
Thanks Professor Ripley. I'd looked at the R Windows FAQ but not carefully
enough.Using Renviron.site does seem much more elegant than Rprofile.site.
I've now included a line in Renviron.site
R_LIBS_SITE=//Server02/stats/R/library
I also note your use of site and personal libraries specific to "first
decimal"
versions of R. Would you recommend others to follow this practice?
Yes: that is the level of compatibility. (It is done automatically for
personal libraries created by R: we set R_LIBS_USER because HOME is
set incorrectly on some of our systems.)
--
Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
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