Thanks all for the tips.

I combined the best of most of them and got the job done. I contacted funet.fi (although I only got the auto-reply before I started pulling data). I used rsync and got around my firewall issues by getting around my firewall, plugging my laptop into a switch between our router and our ISP. Sshhhh! Don't tell the security guys.

After a somewhat painful lesson on how rsync works, I got all the data downloaded fairly quickly. (The other lesson I learned is check out your mirror sources closely. The FTP site I had pulled my preliminary load from was stale by 3 weeks!) I did pull the data down gradually, walking through the alphabetical author/id dirs. Then pulling the whole archive to make sure I had everything and all the links were intact. They were, for the most part, 20 minutes and that step was done!

Once I had the archive complete on the laptop, I rsync-ed my linux box to the laptop. Then I set about the task of making it available to my other hosts (that's where i learned what I did wrong with rsync, and had I RTFM more carefully, I should have caught that mistake. Don't forget the trailing slash on the destination directory!) Set up anonymous FTP on the linux box. Changed the default_site in CPAN.pm on my test box. By end of day I was able to use my mirror to upgrade CPAN on my test host. Cool.