R devel - Jul 2023 - random network disconnects

I'm experiencing a weird issue, and wondering if anyone has seen this, 
and better yet has a solution.

At work we are getting lots of issues with 'permission denied' or 
'network not found' and so forth when reading and writing between our 
machines and a file server.  This happens randomly so the following 
function solves the problem for 'cat' commands:

catSafer <-
function (..., ReTries = 20, ThrowError = TRUE)
{
     for (catsi in seq_len(ReTries)) {
         res <- try(cat(...))
         if (!inherits(res, "try-error"))
             break
     }
     if (inherits(res, "try-error")) {
         if (ThrowError) {
             stop("file connection failed")
         }
         else {
             warning("file connection failed")
         }
     }
}

People have done network traces and such, but so far nothing has been seen.

Thanks,
Pat

-- 
Patrick Burns
pburns at pburns.seanet.com
http://www.portfolioprobe.com/blog
http://www.burns-stat.com
(home of:
  'Impatient R'
  'The R Inferno'
  'Tao Te Programming')

? Mon, 31 Jul 2023 16:43:17 +0100
Patrick Burns <pburns at pburns.seanet.com> ?????:
> At work we are getting lots of issues with 'permission denied' or 
> 'network not found' and so forth when reading and writing between
our
> machines and a file server.  This happens randomly so the following 
> function solves the problem for 'cat' commands
These sound like error codes returned from the operating system, which
R has no choice but forward to the user. (Well, in this case the error
turns out to be transient, but files are unfortunately fraught with
peril with no easy solutions [*].)

Even using system call tracing or setting a symbolic debugger breakpoint
on an error return from cat() will only tell you the OS error code and
the file on which the operation failed, both of which you already know.
Getting to the root of the problem will likely involve drilling down
into the details of the exact networked filesystem used, which R is
supposed to know nothing about. Maybe you could ask on ServerFault or
on #linux / #windows / #<applicable server OS> on Libera.Char?

-- 
Best regards,
Ivan

[*] https://danluu.com/deconstruct-files/