Ben,

After more research on this issue, I have verified that this problem occurs on all other servers running MacOSX that we have for testing(this problem only occurs on MacOSX, it does not occur on Windows or Linux). My hypothesis is that there is a MacOSX security policy which blocks spawned processes from accessing the name service daemon for the operating system.

There are 2 work-arounds for this problem:

   1. Add the hostname (ie xnight.primate.wisc.edu) to the hosts file (/etc/hosts). During my testing, the spawned process was able to resolve hostnames that were host file.

      or

   2. Use the name "localhost" instead of DNS name (xnight.primate.wisc.edu) in the your R script.


I have opened a bug to track this problem. (https://www.labkey.org/issues/home/Developer/issues/details.view?issueId=10767)

Thank you,