R And SSH Tunnels

Steph Locke shows how to set up an SSH tunnel to connect to an external server within R:

Whilst down the rabbit hole, I discovered just in passing via a beanstalk article that there’s actually been a command line interface for PuTTY called plink. D’oh! This changed the whole direction of the solution to what I present throughout.

Using plink.exe as the command line interface for PuTTY we can then connect to our remote network using the key pre-authenticated via pageant. As a consequence, we can now use the shell() command in R to use plink. We can then connect to our database using the standard Postgres driver.

PuTTY is a must-have for any Windows box.