Programming with Big Data -- Remote Procedure Call

A very light implementation yet secure for remote procedure calls with unified interface via ssh (OpenSSH) or plink/plink.exe (PuTTY).

pbdRPC

• Version: 0.2-0
• License:
• Download:
• Status:
• Author: See section below.

A very light yet secure implementation for remote procedure calls with unified interface via ssh (OpenSSH) or plink/plink.exe (PuTTY).

See pbdRPC vignette for more details and applications.

Usage

library(pbdRPC)

m <- machine("192.168.56.101", "snoweye")
m
## Machine config for [email protected]
##     pport = 22
##     type = ssh
##     args = ""
##     priv.key = ~/.ssh/id_rsa
##     priv.key.ppk = ./id_rsa.ppk

rpc(m, "whoami")
## snoweye

If no username is supplied during machine configuration, then we take the local system user name (which of course may not be correct...):

m <- machine("192.168.56.101")
rpc(m, "whoami")
## snoweye

Features

• The rpc() or srpc() are unified interfaces across most popular OSs including Linux, Mac OSX, MS Windows, and Solaris.
• The above example is completely done in an interactive R session.
• The call is equivalent to ssh [email protected] "whoami" in a Linux-like system and plink.exe [email protected] "whoami" in a windows system, provided that ssh and plink.exe are reachable through the environment variable, PATH.
• The default communications between the local R and the remote server (192.168.56.101 in this case) are encrypted and secure, by default using RSA version 2.
• Private and public paired key authentications are supported, i.e. login without password.
• Port forwarding is also supported for two way tunneling, both local -L and remote/reverse -R.

Installation

To install the R package, run:

install.package("coop")

The development version is maintained on GitHub, and can easily be installed by any of the packages that offer installations from GitHub:

### Pick your preference
devtools::install_github("RBigData/pbdRPC")
ghit::install_github("RBigData/pbdRPC")
remotes::install_github("RBigData/pbdRPC")

Citation

When mentioning the pbdRPC, please cite:

@MISC{pbdRPC2017,
  author = {Chen, W.-C and Schmidt, D.},
  title = {{pbdRPC}: Programming with Big Data -- Remote Procedure Call},
  year = {2017},
  note = {{R} Package, URL https://cran.r-project.org/package=pbdRPC}
}

Authors

pbdRPC is authored and maintained by the pbdR core team:

• Wei-Chen Chen
• Drew Schmidt