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

Because of problems discussed below, I have installed a new version of perl, made sure that the commands "cpan" and "perl" are the + new commands, just installed, etc. Then I did sudo find .cpan -exec chmod a+w {} \; to make sure my ftps would not get on the wrong side of permissions Then sudo cpan Then o conf init, but that command wanted to download from CPAN using ftp, so I got into my USUAL troubles.... Namely: All the ftp mirrors, all the ftp type commands, eg wget, fail, without + fail. On the other hand, manual ftp succeeds on the same CPAN files, without using root status. Here is a typical snippet of the failure (partial result of cpan> o conf init): Couldn't fetch MIRRORED.BY from ftp.mirror.ac.uk Fetching with Net::FTP ftp://ftp.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/CPAN/MI +RRORED.BY.gz Couldn't fetch MIRRORED.BY.gz from ftp.mirror.ac.uk LWP not available Fetching with Net::FTP: ftp://usit.shef.ac.uk/pub/packages/CPAN/MIRRORED.BY Couldn't fetch MIRRORED.BY from usit.shef.ac.uk Fetching with Net::FTP ftp://usit.shef.ac.uk/pub/packages/CPAN/MIRRORED.BY.gz Couldn't fetch MIRRORED.BY.gz from usit.shef.ac.uk Can anyone throw any light on this? Thanks a lot. David

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Re: installation via cpan/ftp problems for newbie
by gellyfish (Monsignor) on Jul 26, 2005 at 19:41 UTC

    It might be a problem with passive FTP, could you try creating a file called .libnetrc in your home directory with:

    { ftp_ext_passive => 1 }
    to see if that fixes it?

    /J\

      Thanks---I'll try that. I am having lots of problems with Net::FTP. I posted another tale of woe at Net::FTP is NEVER successful

      The two requests for help may or may not be related. However, in this other post, I manage to get much further in tracking down the problem, and it's got nothing to do with passive FTP. I would be most grateful if anyone looking at this email would take a quick look at my other post.

      Thanks again
      David

      No, it doesn't change the behaviour.

      D