[slime-devel] loopback interface

[Thomas F. Burdick]

Robert Brown writes:
 > Recently, I've been running a Lisp-based server on a batch scheduling
 > system.
 > The scheduler starts up my server on an available machine and then I'd like
 > to
 > connect to it with Slime. I've noticed two things:
 > 
 > 1. The code in swank.lisp listens on port 127.0.0.1 <http://127.0.0.1>,
 > which means I cannot
 > connect to my Lisp server from a remote machine. I must log in to the host
 > it's running on and then specify "localhost" when I execute slime-connect in
 > Emacs. If swank is running on host "foo", why doesn't it bind its listening
 > socket with foo's address?

To prevent any random machine on the internet from being able to
connect to and control your running Lisp.  This is a feature, not a
shortcomming; some people use slime to control lisp-based webservers.

 > 2. I modified swank.lisp so the server code binds its listening connection
 > socket with foo's address. Now I can connect from a remote machine. Is there
 > any convenient way to send whole files across the Slime connection? The
 > Lisp running the swank server has no NFS access to the machine I'm running
 > Emacs on. I'd like to be able to edit files on the Emacs side and send then
 > whole to the Lisp running swank.

The normal way to do this is to run the lisp on a remote machine, and
ssh to it, tunneling the swank comminications port.  You can use a
local emacs to edit remote files by using tramp (an emacs package).
If you create appropriate functions for
slime-translate-from-lisp-filename-function and
slime-translate-to-lisp-filename-function, you can use C-c C-k and
M-. and all the other slime commands as you normally would.

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