CPAN Module troubles

Wally Hartshorn has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm not sure whether PerlMonks is the place to ask this, but I'm not sure where to turn.

I have two Unix boxen. Both are Sun machines running Solaris 2.7. Both machines have Perl 5.6.1 installed.

On one machine, running perl -MCPAN -e shell works great.

On the other machine, it formerly worked great. Now I'm getting plenty of "cannot find that" error messages and very little joy. I'm hoping that someone can tell me how to fix the problem, or at least how to investigate it further.

Oddly enough, after all of the numerous error messages and many minutes of patient waiting, I eventually do get the requested module installed. Weird!

Here's an excerpt of the type of message I get. This has been going on for a month or two now.

cpan> install Bundle::CPAN
CPAN: Storable loaded ok
CPAN: LWP::UserAgent loaded ok
Fetching with LWP:
  ftp://ftp.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
LWP failed with code[404] message[Can't chdir to CPAN]
Fetching with Net::FTP:
  ftp://ftp.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
Couldn't cwd CPAN/authors at /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.6.1/CPAN.pm line 2
+182.
Fetching with LWP:
  ftp://mirror.xmission.com/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
LWP failed with code[401] message[Anonymous cannot have more than 1 op
+en session per host.]
Fetching with Net::FTP:
  ftp://mirror.xmission.com/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
Couldn't login on mirror.xmission.com at /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.6.1/CP
+AN.pm line 2178.
Fetching with LWP:
  ftp://ftp.sunsite.utk.edu/pub/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
LWP failed with code[401] message[Login incorrect.]
Fetching with Net::FTP:
  ftp://ftp.sunsite.utk.edu/pub/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
Couldn't login on ftp.sunsite.utk.edu at /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.6.1/CP
+AN.pm line 2178.
Fetching with LWP:
  ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/mirrors/cpan/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
LWP failed with code[404] message[Can't chdir to mirrors]
Fetching with Net::FTP:
  ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/mirrors/cpan/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
Couldn't cwd pub/mirrors/cpan/authors at /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.6.1/CP
+AN.pm line 2182.

Trying with "/usr/local/bin/lynx -source" to get
    ftp://ftp.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz

Looking up ftp.cpan.org
Making FTP connection to ftp.cpan.org
Can't Access `ftp://ftp.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz'
Alert!: Unable to access document.

lynx: Can't access startfile 

System call "/usr/local/bin/lynx -source "ftp://ftp.cpan.org/CPAN/auth
+ors/01mailrc.txt.gz"  > /rootwh/.cpan/sources/authors/01mailrc.txt"
returned status 255 (wstat 65280)
Warning: expected file [/rootwh/.cpan/sources/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz]
+ doesn't exist
[download]

Here's the output of "o conf":

cpan> o conf
CPAN::Config options from /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.6.1/CPAN/Config.pm:
    commit             Commit changes to disk
    defaults           Reload defaults from disk
    init               Interactive setting of all options

    build_cache        10
    build_dir          /rootwh/.cpan/build
    cache_metadata     1
    cpan_home          /rootwh/.cpan
    dontload_hash     
    ftp                /usr/bin/ftp
    ftp_proxy          
    getcwd             cwd
    gzip               /usr/local/bin/gzip
    http_proxy         
    inactivity_timeout 0
    index_expire       1
    inhibit_startup_message 0
    keep_source_where  /rootwh/.cpan/sources
    lynx               /usr/local/bin/lynx
    make               /usr/local/bin/make
    make_arg           
    make_install_arg   
    makepl_arg         
    ncftp              
    ncftpget           
    no_proxy           
    pager              more
    prerequisites_policy ask
    scan_cache         atstart
    shell              /bin/csh
    tar                /usr/local/bin/tar
    term_is_latin      1
    unzip              /usr/bin/unzip
    urllist           
        ftp://ftp.cpan.org/CPAN/
        ftp://mirror.xmission.com/CPAN/
        ftp://ftp.sunsite.utk.edu/pub/CPAN/
        ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/mirrors/cpan/
    wait_list         
        wait://ls6.informatik.uni-dortmund.de:1404
    wget               
cpan>
[download]

Wally Hartshorn

Comment on CPAN Module troubles Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: CPAN Module troubles by chromatic (Archbishop) on Sep 12, 2002 at 23:51 UTC
My guess is that it's an old mirror list. Reconfigure CPAN, or edit CPAN::Config, and use newer mirrors. `$ lwp-download ftp://ftp.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz lwp-download: 404 Can't chdir to CPAN` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: CPAN Module troubles by hmerrill (Friar) on Sep 13, 2002 at 12:55 UTC
I had a problem similar to that a few months ago - it turned out to be a problem with the selected CPAN ftp client having problems with our firewall. I believe(?) what I did was to remove the ftp entry(don't give it a value), and gave value "q/usr/bin/ncftpget," to the "ncftpget" key. That's my vague recollection of what I did to solve the problem. I think I had to read the CPAN(?) docs 'perldoc CPAN' to figure that out. HTH.	[reply]