R help - Feb 2003 - download CRAN packages and proxy config.

Dear R users,

I'm starting to get acquainted with R. I've been reading the manual, and
I
understood that if I wanted to install a user written package on R, I could
do it directly from the Internet, by typing the line
install.packages("quantreg") in an R session.

To my surprise this command did not work, nor did the command "update
packages from CRAN..." from the menu option. In the latter I got the
following error message:

<- CRAN.packages()
+ install.packages(select.list(a[,1],,TRUE), .libPaths()[1], available=a)}
trying URL `http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/PACKAGES'
unable to connect to 'cran.r-project.org'.
Error in download.file(url = paste(contriburl, "PACKAGES", sep =
"/"),  :
        cannot open URL
`http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/PACKAGES'
>
The strange thing was that I was able to visit the internet address the R
was trying to connect, from my web browser. Thus I imagine that the problem
was a proxy issue on R.

I would sincerely appreciate if one of the more experience R user could help
me to sort this issue out. I found a way to configure my proxy setting by
typing on the main window '"http://wwwcache.ncl.ac.uk:8080/"',
however it
didn't seem to have worked, as I kept getting the same error message when I
tried to connect the CRAN.

Any help would be extremely appreciated,

Joao Pedro/

"Joao Pedro W. de Azevedo" wrote:
> 
> Dear R users,
> 
> I'm starting to get acquainted with R. I've been reading the
manual, and I
> understood that if I wanted to install a user written package on R, I could
> do it directly from the Internet, by typing the line
> install.packages("quantreg") in an R session.
> 
> To my surprise this command did not work, nor did the command "update
> packages from CRAN..." from the menu option. In the latter I got the
> following error message:
> 
> <- CRAN.packages()
> + install.packages(select.list(a[,1],,TRUE), .libPaths()[1], available=a)}
> trying URL `http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/PACKAGES'
> unable to connect to 'cran.r-project.org'.
> Error in download.file(url = paste(contriburl, "PACKAGES", sep =
"/"),  :
>         cannot open URL
> `http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/PACKAGES'
> >
> 
> The strange thing was that I was able to visit the internet address the R
> was trying to connect, from my web browser. Thus I imagine that the problem
> was a proxy issue on R.
> 
> I would sincerely appreciate if one of the more experience R user could
help
> me to sort this issue out. I found a way to configure my proxy setting by
> typing on the main window
'"http://wwwcache.ncl.ac.uk:8080/"', however it
> didn't seem to have worked, as I kept getting the same error message
when I
> tried to connect the CRAN.
> 
> Any help would be extremely appreciated,
> 
> Joao Pedro/
Please read Section 2.16 "The internet download functions fail." of
the
R for Windows FAQ.

Uwe Ligges

Joao Pedro W. de Azevedo <jazevedo at provide.com.br>
wrote:
> install.packages("quantreg")
> To my surprise this command did not work...
> Error in download.file(url = paste(contriburl, "PACKAGES", sep =
"/")...
It took me years to figure out how to get through our firewall, from my
Solaris 2.6 machine (now) running R-1.6.2.  There were 3 crucial steps:

1) In my .Rprofile:  options(download.file.method="wget")
   (The default method "internal" does not seem to work for me.)

2) In my .cshrc:     setenv http_proxy <some.proxy.server>:8000

3) <some.proxy.server> is NOT the name I find in my web browser!  The web
   browser knows the machine that serves "Proxy Auto-Configuration"
files, but
   I needed to get the name of an actual proxy server from our local guru.

Hope that helps!
-- 
                              -- David Brahm (brahm at alum.mit.edu)