How to restore from octave-core?

[0000-Admin(0000)]

A user was attempting to plot a run which had gone for 24 hours. She
rec'd the msg: connection to external plotter lost. Try again. She
tried again and the readline interface locked up. C-c, C-q, C-\, none
worked. We sent a kill with the default arg of SIGTERM to the octave
process and it dumped to a file called octave-core.

So, 
  1: how can we get this run loaded back in via octave-core?
  2: why were we losing the connection to the external plotter?

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