This is not an issue of how to use the CPAN shell, but which modules come preinstalled at your site.

The usual solution for using CPAN behind firewalls is:

• have LWP modules preinstalled (e.g., from a CPAN CD or Linux distribution CD)
• set the http_proxy and ftp_proxy environment variables to something like "http://proxy.mydomain.com:8080"
• just use the CPAN shell like before

Christian Lemburg
Brainbench MVP for Perl
http://www.brainbench.com