Re: Help my IT admin unblock PPM and CPAN, please.

I'd say, start from the basics. Can you, from the same machine you're running the CPAN shell, actually FTP to a CPAN mirror? Try different mirrors if it fails. If you can connect, is your FTP connection using active or passive mode? If it's in active mode, it's the remote server that sets up the data connection - which may be blocked by your firewall(s). If you cannot connect using FTP, can you connect using HTTP? Try just doing a GET request first - or even a plain telnet to port 80 (or whatever port the mirror is using).

If all that is failing, but you can ssh out to some machine (internally or externally) that can FTP or HTTP to a CPAN mirror, you could always set up an ssh tunnel.

Comment on Re: Help my IT admin unblock PPM and CPAN, please.

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Re^2: Help my IT admin unblock PPM and CPAN, please. by aplonis (Pilgrim) on Apr 22, 2010 at 16:33 UTC
I can communicate via FTP on the Win32 command line to various places. There is no `passive` command listed under `help` for Win32 FTP daemon. I can do `get` via mini Perl script using `LWP::Simple`. Using the MSIE browser I can see the PPM repository web pages. I just keep getting `Not found` responses when I call `get` in regular CPAN and when PPM tries to fetch the packlist. I've ordered the book for Wireshark as I can't seem to make much from all the tons of info it delivers. This mystery is really quite frustrating. Grrr.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: Help my IT admin unblock PPM and CPAN, please. by JavaFan (Canon) on Apr 22, 2010 at 21:04 UTC
I can communicate via FTP on the Win32 command line to various places. Including the CPAN mirror your CPAN client is connecting to? How is your CPAN client configured? How is it configured to fetch things? Which CPAN mirror(s) is it using? Using the MSIE browser I can see the PPM repository web pages. Do you run the browser from the same machine you're using the CPAN client from?	[reply]