From hb at stat.berkeley.edu  Mon Oct 19 05:38:57 2009
From: hb at stat.berkeley.edu (Henrik Bengtsson)
Date: Sun, 18 Oct 2009 20:38:57 -0700
Subject: [Rd] Specifying (set of random) port numbers for the help HTML
	server (Was: Re: Fixing html help port in 2.10)
In-Reply-To: <4ADB2CCD.3030806@stats.uwo.ca>
References: <59d7961d0910162108i63cc422n95453f913785609@mail.gmail.com> 
	<4ADB2CCD.3030806@stats.uwo.ca>
Message-ID: <59d7961d0910182038t5fe12aafo9ca4d567ddbebb7c@mail.gmail.com>

On Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 7:57 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
> On 17/10/2009 12:08 AM, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 7:54 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 10/16/2009 10:39 AM, Dieter Menne wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I noted that the new html-help in 2.10 under Windows uses a random port
>>>> on
>>>> my
>>>> computer.
>>>> This cause a problem, because when I create a link such as:
>>>>
>>>> http://127.0.0.1:28027/library/stats/html/addmargins.html
>>>>
>>>> this is for one-time use only. Is it possible to fix the port?
>>>
>>> Not currently. ?If you look in tools:::startDynamicHelp you can see how
>>> it
>>> is set up; you could duplicate that setup as a temporary workaround. ?You
>>> might be better off to build R with static help instead. ?What is the
>>> application where you want to be able to give out links? ?Perhaps we
>>> could
>>> consult an environment variable or option() to choose the port instead of
>>> leaving it completely random.
>>>
>>> The reason it is random is the worry that multiple R instances on the
>>> same
>>> machine might collide. ?All processes on the machine see the same ports.
>>
>> Related:
>> I'd like to suggest an option/environment variable that specifies the
>> set of port numbers sampled from, e.g. 6800:6850 or similar.
>
> I've added an option "help.ports" to set this. ?It will try your specified
> ports in order; if you want a random selection, permute them yourself, e.g.
>
> options(help.ports = sample(6800:6850))
>
> This will make it into 2.10.0.

Thanks.

-Henrik

>
> Duncan Murdoch
>
>>
>> The reason is that in some places, the user don't have admin
>> privileges on the computer and most/all ports are blocked from running
>> servers, and there is a sysadm that needs to approve each port to be
>> unblocked. ?With such a security polices it is possible to have the
>> smaller set of port number unblocked (but not the full 0-65535 range).
>> ?This applies at least to "regular users" on Windows.
>>
>> My $.02
>>
>> /Henrik
>>
>>> Duncan Murdoch
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>>
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>
>



[Rd] Specifying (set of random) port numbers for the help HTML server (Was: Re: Fixing html help port in 2.10)
Henrik Bengtsson