[Pkg-r-builders] Hello, world

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 28 March 2017 at 22:56, Michael Rutter wrote:
| Just to follow up on the Penn State situation.  Since the grant had no 
| overhead in the budget, it rules out using Penn State resources.  That 
| would include housing a server, even if the funds for the server was 
| external.
| 
| There is a small loophole.  If the grant was to be given as a gift, 
| which roughly means there is not a contract between myself and the R 
| Foundation, then this becomes part of my research program.  We could 
| then work out some sort of arrangement.
| 
| An additional complication: Penn State has recently become very strict 
| on accessing servers from outside of Penn State.  I had to get special 
| permission to open up the ssh port on a server so CRAN can have access 
| to the Ubuntu packages.  The network powers that be are not thrilled 
| about that, and the access is restricted to one external IP.  If we 
| wanted to access a server inside Penn State, we would likely need to use 
| a VPN.

That;s annoying but at least we'd have decent connecticity.

I see two possible alternatives:

 -- cloud (and Gabor may be able to speak to this some more)

    -- either just begging and using his Azure etc lot for now
    
    -- renting at aws, rackspace, gandi, ... as for $50-$100/mon we should
       get something decent

 -- crazy idea:  either replace or complement my aging server here

I have been accessing the server here for years from the outside. Not ideal
but a fallback. Over time we find a real hosting sponsor.

Dirk

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org