Please show us the output of such a botched cpan session. 
cpan UNIVERSAL::can
CPAN: Storable loaded ok (v2.15)
Going to read /root/.cpan/Metadata
  Database was generated on Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:27:04 GMT
CPAN: YAML loaded ok (v0.68)
Going to read 45 yaml files from /root/.cpan/build/
CPAN: Time::HiRes loaded ok (v1.86)
......................................................................
+......DONE
Restored the state of 45 (in 0.4750 secs)
Running install for module 'UNIVERSAL::can'
Running make for C/CH/CHROMATIC/UNIVERSAL-can-1.15.tar.gz
Unwrapping had some problem, won't try again without force
  Had problems unarchiving. Please build manually
Running make test
  Make had some problems, won't test
Running make install
  Make had some problems, won't install

[download]
A manual install works without any issues.
I think I remember that problem, and it had something to do with installing a bad version of Archive::Tar which didn't extract the distributions properly.
I have tried Archive::Tar upgrading from 1.48 to 1.52 but it has made no difference. An example of where everything is missing. 
prod> ls -l
total 2513
drwxr-xr-x 8 1000 1000    1024 Sep 10 11:03 CPAN-1.9402
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2560000 Sep 10 09:36 CPAN-1.9402.tar
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root     242 Sep 10 09:36 Makefile.PL
prod> cat Makefile.PL
# This Makefile.PL has been autogenerated by the module CPAN.pm
# because there was no Makefile.PL supplied.
# Autogenerated on: Thu Sep 10 09:36:55 2009

use ExtUtils::MakeMaker;
WriteMakefile(
              NAME => q[CPAN],
             );

[download]
Again a manual install worked.
r maybe use CPAN::SQLite, which supposedly has lesser memory requirements. For your test machine, just compile your own "dev" Perl, a Perl 5.8.8 -
Both ideas sound worth a try and will get added to the evergrowing to do list.

In reply to Re^2: perl module installs getting really mesed up by SilasTheMonk
in thread perl module installs getting really mesed up by SilasTheMonk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.