[R] Oddity with internet access and R 11.0 with Sophos firewall and Windoze XP - solved

[Chris Evans]

Just in case anyone else hits this.  I just installed R 11.0 alongside R
10.1.0 (off my D: drive in D:\R\... but I think that's irrelevent) and
all went well, I selected my nearest CRAN mirror (Bristol is the one I
like) and getting the selection list seemed to take ages though it did
come eventually.  However, I then got an error message saying that R
couldn't make contact on port 80.  I rechecked with R 10.1.0: fine.  I
reinstalled R 11.0.0 and selected "internet2" instead of "standard" for
internet, no change.

I thought "Can't be the firewall as it wouldn't get the list of mirrors"
but I went into Sophos firewall and manually added R 11.0.0 and
everything is now fine.

Very odd and I'd be interested to hear if some clever person can explain
why R 11.0.0 was making (very slow) access to the internet to get the
list of mirrors but then failing (I have the 10.1.0 location in the
windows path but not, yet, the 11.0.0 one, could it be that?)

However, ultimately this seems to me to be a problem with Sophos's
firewall not R and I'm just reporting it here in case anyone else sees
the same and finds this helpful.

Thanks to the R team, yet again, for an amazing product!

Chris


-- 
Chris Evans <chris at psyctc.org> Skype: chris-psyctc
Consultant Psychiatrist in Psychotherapy, Notts. PDD network;
Trust Research Governance Lead and Clinical Director, Psychological
  Therapies Directorate in Local Services, Nottinghamshire NHS Trust;
Professor, Psychotherapy, Nottingham University
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