Ben,

I believe this is a server configuration problem. When the LabKey server launches a R process to run your script. The R process is unable to resolve the an IP address for xnight.primate.wisc.edu.

I verified this was the problem by creating a new R view and attempting to run the R script

  system("ping xnight.primate.wisc.edu")

This gives the error message "ping: cannot resolve xnight.primate.wisc.edu: Unknown host"

DNS Name resolution on your server is handled by the OS. There are a number of services that cache the DNS resolution results. My guess is that the result "Unknown host" is due to this caching.

I am not able to reproduce your behavior on any of our local test servers, both linux and macosx.

Lets take this problem private and setup a quick call where I can help you debug the problem with your OS caching.

-Brian