I act as sysadmin for minor issues for my data science work team on a Linux server with R installed. I'm a member of the wheel group and mainly look after keeping R libraries up to date, managing users, and being a point of contact for the actual sysadmins. My Linux experience doesn't go much farther than that.
When trying to start R as a regular user today, we all get the error message "Fatal error: cannot create 'R_TempDir'" but when starting R with sudo there's no problem:
[djleamy@xxx /]$ R
Fatal error: cannot create 'R_TempDir'
[djleamy@xxx /]$ sudo R
R version 3.4.0 (2017-04-21) -- "You Stupid Darkness"
Copyright (C) 2017 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Platform: x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu (64-bit)
...
/tmp is almost empty, and the fact that R launches for root but not a user indicates to me that it's not a space issue anyway, though there may be another folder I'm not aware of that R uses. There are no environment variables in Renviron defining a separate temporary folder.
Everything was working fine as of yesterday. None of us made any changes to the server and no patching has occurred that I've been told about.
Permissions on /tmp were 755. As a quick fix for our problems I've set permissions on /tmp to 777, which lets us use R for now but doesn't get to the cause of the problem, which is what I want to figure out.
Any ideas why users suddenly wouldn't be able to use R but root can?