Because of problems discussed below, I have installed a new
version of perl, made sure that the commands "cpan" and "perl" are the new commands, just installed, etc.

Then I did sudo find .cpan -exec chmod a+w {} \;
to make sure my ftps would not get on the wrong side of
permissions
Then sudo cpan
Then o conf init, but that command wanted to download
from CPAN using ftp, so I got into my USUAL troubles....

Namely:
All the ftp mirrors, all the ftp type commands, eg wget, fail, without fail.
On the other hand, manual ftp succeeds on the same CPAN
files, without using root status. Here is a typical snippet
of the failure (partial result of cpan> o conf init):

Couldn't fetch MIRRORED.BY from ftp.mirror.ac.uk
Fetching with Net::FTP
  ftp://ftp.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/CPAN/MIRRORED.BY.gz
Couldn't fetch MIRRORED.BY.gz from ftp.mirror.ac.uk
LWP not available
Fetching with Net::FTP:
  ftp://usit.shef.ac.uk/pub/packages/CPAN/MIRRORED.BY
Couldn't fetch MIRRORED.BY from usit.shef.ac.uk
Fetching with Net::FTP
  ftp://usit.shef.ac.uk/pub/packages/CPAN/MIRRORED.BY.gz
Couldn't fetch MIRRORED.BY.gz from usit.shef.ac.uk

Can anyone throw any light on this? Thanks a lot.

David