[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] ***SPAM*** Re: ***SPAM*** Installing CPAN Error

[Dan Scott]

On 31 March 2010 20:35, Rebecca Larocque
<Rebecca.LAROCQUE at cityofnorthbay.ca> wrote:
> Hello all – long time lurker, first time poster.
>
>
>
> Right now, I’m setting up a test server for Evergreen on a spare computer
> running Ubuntu 8.04 (“Hardy Heron”).  I’ll spare you the details of how it
> took a total of five hours to set up the user “opensrf”, suffice to say I
> finally managed it this afternoon.  Everything was going well until I got to
> the step where you install the software prerequisites (step #3); I entered
> “make -f src/extras/Makefile.install ubutu-hardy”; it ran through the
> installation until it got to this point:
>
>
>
> Please enter your CPAN site: []
>
> CPAN.pm needs at least one URL where it can fetch CPAN files from.
>
>
>
> The default site wasn’t working, so I found an alternate mirror site and
> entered that URL.  This is what happened next:
>
>
>
> commit: wrote /etc/perl/CPAN/Config.pm
>
> Fetching with LWP:
>
>   ftp://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/pub/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
>
> LWP failed with code[500] message[LWP::Protocol::MyFTP: connect: Connection
> refused]
>
> Fetching with Net::FTP:
>
>   ftp://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/pub/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
>
>
>
> [Snip]
>
>
>
> Could not fetch authors/id/T/TM/TMTM/Class-DBI-0.96.tar.gz
>
> Giving up on
> '/root/.cpan/sources/authors/id/T/TM/TMTM/Class-DBI-0.96.tar.gz'
>
>
>
> make: *** [install_cpan_force] Error 2
>
>
>
> I tried running “make” again, but it didn’t allow me to try another mirror
> site.  Is it just a matter of throwing mirror FTP sites at it until
> something works, or is it something less obvious?
>

A possibility is that you might be behind a firewall that's preventing
FTP connections; if so, you'll need to try a mirror that offers HTTP
support.

Which means you'll need to reconfigure your CPAN setup: you can choose
more than one mirror when you configure CPAN, but it can be tricky to
get back into CPAN configuration mode if you haven't been down that
road before.

So, as the regular user on your system, start up the CPAN command line:

$ sudo cpan

You should see something like (I'm using Ubuntu Karmic, so versions
etc will be slightly different):

CPAN: File::HomeDir loaded ok (v0.86)
Terminal does not support AddHistory.

cpan shell -- CPAN exploration and modules installation (v1.9205)
ReadLine support available (maybe install Bundle::CPAN or Bundle::CPANxxl?)

cpan[1]>

At the cpan> prompt, you can kick off the interactive configuration
again with the "o conf init" command (intuitive, eh?):

cpan[1]> o conf init

It will ask you if you want it to try and configure things
automatically. You get to say "No" because you want to specify the
list of mirrors in the urllist parameter. So, say "No", then hit Enter
over and over again to accept the default values. You will eventually
get to the point where CPAN asks if it can connect to the Internet to
update its list of mirrors. Let it do that, then pick your mirrors
again - this time, ensure that you get at least one that offers HTTP
access to try and eliminate that problem.

Hmm; looking at the mirrors available for North America -> Canada, all
7 are FTP sites. There are a number of HTTP mirrors in North America
-> USA, but you'll have to hit SPACE + Return to page through to them
(http://cpan.belfry.net/ and the like).

Note that when you select mirrors, you can specify a range: e.g. 35-48
to get a broad selection of HTTP mirrors in USA. That way, if one goes
down for some reason, your CPAN command will automatically move on to
try the next one.

Hopefully this helps!

-- 
Dan Scott
Laurentian University