How do you configure Perl CPAN in Solaris?

Question

I can't seem to get CPAN installs working on a Solaris machine. Here is my current output.

~# perl -MCPAN -eshell
Terminal does not support AddHistory.

cpan shell -- CPAN exploration and modules installation (v1.7601)
ReadLine support available (try 'install Bundle::CPAN')

cpan> install Bundle::LWP                 
CPAN: Storable loaded ok
LWP not available
CPAN: Net::FTP loaded ok
Fetching with Net::FTP:
  ftp://ftp.dti.ad.jp/pub/lang/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
Couldn't fetch 01mailrc.txt.gz from ftp.dti.ad.jp
...
...

This output is repeated for every mirror. Any ideas why this doesn't work?

Answer 1

There's a few possibilities of what it could be, but the most typical issue is that you're behind a firewall that requires you to use passive FTP. You can either look for an HTTP mirror, or try setting the environmental variable FTP_PASSIVE to a true value before running cpan.