Hmm, good one. I'm going to take a stab at it, but I'm really not sure what it might be.

• On the BSD box, rearrange the CPAN servers. What are you using as your first one? Try one of the ones from your RedHat machine.
• Try to wget the file manually, ala http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/ANDK/CPAN-1.60b.tar.gz. Does that come up?
• Make sure you have the latest CPAN on that machine
• What does CPAN debugging say. At the cpan> prompt, type:

  o debug
  #for a list of choices, but you'll probably want
  o debug cpan
  o debug ftp
  [download]

• You might be able to cheat CPAN. If you use LWP to get the file, then you can choose which one you want. Then pick up in the get() function from CPAN.pm where it leaves off.

I can't see a preference anywhere for .zip or .gz files, and all the docs I see say that .zip is deprecated or for Windows machines, so I'm thinking it might be the CPAN server. Check which mirrors you're using first.

    --jb