How do I install a module? Strawberry Perl issues

Question

I am trying to install a Perl module within Strawberry Perl on Windows 7.

I'm running the below command and am getting a slew of messages I don't understand. It looks like I am getting 500 errors, as though the page isn't reachable. However, when I point the mirrors in my browser I have no problem accessing the FTP directories. I have little Perl experience on Linux, and none on Windows. I tried manually adding a mirror to the urllist, and I don't think that helped.

C:\Program Files> cpan Win32::IE::Mechanize

CPAN: LWP::UserAgent loaded ok (v5.835)
CPAN: Time::HiRes loaded ok (v1.9721)
Fetching with LWP:
http://cpan.strawberryperl.com/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
LWP failed with code[500] message[Can't connect to cpan.strawberryperl.com:80 (Bad hostname 'cpan.strawberryperl.com')]
Warning: no success downloading 'C:\strawberry\cpan\sources\authors\01mailrc.txt.gz.tmp5264'. Giving up on it.
Fetching with LWP:
ftp://mirror.teklinks.com/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
LWP failed with code[500] message[LWP::Protocol::MyFTP: Bad hostname 'mirror.teklinks.com']
Fetching with Net::FTP:
ftp://mirror.teklinks.com/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
  Could not connect to host 'mirror.teklinks.com' with Net::FTP
Fetching with Net::FTP
ftp://mirror.teklinks.com/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz.gz
  Could not connect to host 'mirror.teklinks.com' with Net::FTP
Warning: no success downloading 'C:\strawberry\cpan\sources\authors\01mailrc.txt.gz.tmp5264'. Giving up on it.
Warning: no success downloading 'C:\strawberry\cpan\sources\authors\01mailrc.txt.gz.tmp5264'. Giving up on it.

As a last resort we now switch to the external ftp command 'C:\WINDOWS\system32\ftp.EXE'
to get 'C:\strawberry\cpan\sources\authors\01mailrc.txt.gz.tmp5264'.

Doing so often leads to problems that are hard to diagnose.

If you're the victim of such problems, please consider unsetting the
ftp config variable with

    o conf ftp ""
    o conf commit

Issuing "C:\WINDOWS\system32\ftp.EXE -n"

  Trying with external ftp to get
    ftp://mirror.teklinks.com/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
  Going to send the dialog
    open mirror.teklinks.com
    user anonymous [e-mail]
    lcd C:\strawberry\cpan\sources\authors
    cd /
    cd CPAN
    cd authors
    bin
    passive
    get 01mailrc.txt.gz 01mailrc.txt.gz.tmp5264
    quit

Unknown host mirror.teklinks.com.
Not connected.
Local directory now C:\strawberry\cpan\sources\authors.
Not connected.
Not connected.
Not connected.
Not connected.
Invalid command.
Not connected.
Bad luck... Still failed!
Can't access URL ftp://mirror.teklinks.com/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz.

Fetching with LWP:
http://cpan.strawberryperl.com/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
LWP failed with code[500] message[Can't connect to cpan.strawberryperl.com:80 (Bad hostname 'cpan.strawberryperl.com')]
Warning: no success downloading 'C:\strawberry\cpan\sources\authors\01mailrc.txt.gz.tmp5264'. Giving up on it.
Warning: no success downloading 'C:\strawberry\cpan\sources\authors\01mailrc.txt.gz.tmp5264'. Giving up on it.
Fetching with LWP:
ftp://mirror.teklinks.com/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
LWP failed with code[500] message[LWP::Protocol::MyFTP: Bad hostname 'mirror.teklinks.com']
Fetching with Net::FTP:
ftp://mirror.teklinks.com/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
  Could not connect to host 'mirror.teklinks.com' with Net::FTP
Fetching with Net::FTP
ftp://mirror.teklinks.com/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz.gz
  Could not connect to host 'mirror.teklinks.com' with Net::FTP
Warning: no success downloading 'C:\strawberry\cpan\sources\authors\01mailrc.txt.gz.tmp5264'. Giving up on it.
Warning: no success downloading 'C:\strawberry\cpan\sources\authors\01mailrc.txt.gz.tmp5264'. Giving up on it.

As a last resort we now switch to the external ftp command 'C:\WINDOWS\system32\ftp.EXE'
to get 'C:\strawberry\cpan\sources\authors\01mailrc.txt.gz.tmp5264'.

Doing so often leads to problems that are hard to diagnose.

If you're the victim of such problems, please consider unsetting the
ftp config variable with

    o conf ftp ""
    o conf commit

Issuing "C:\WINDOWS\system32\ftp.EXE -n"

  Trying with external ftp to get
    ftp://mirror.teklinks.com/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
  Going to send the dialog
    open mirror.teklinks.com
    user anonymous [e-mail]
    lcd C:\strawberry\cpan\sources\authors
    cd /
    cd CPAN
    cd authors
    bin
    passive
    get 01mailrc.txt.gz 01mailrc.txt.gz.tmp5264
    quit

Unknown host mirror.teklinks.com.
Not connected.
Local directory now C:\strawberry\cpan\sources\authors.
Not connected.
Not connected.
Not connected.
Not connected.
Invalid command.
Not connected.
Bad luck... Still failed!
Can't access URL ftp://mirror.teklinks.com/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz.

CPAN: YAML loaded ok (v0.73)
Please check, if the URLs I found in your configuration file
(http://cpan.strawberryperl.com/, ftp://mirror.teklinks.com/CPAN/) are
valid. The urllist can be edited. E.g. with 'o conf urllist push
ftp://myurl/'

Could not fetch authors/01mailrc.txt.gz

Answer 1

This looks like a proxy issue. The cpan shell uses environment variables which need to be set so it knows about a proxy -- it can't detect them from the browser.

The environment variables are:

http_proxy         proxy host for http requests
ftp_proxy          proxy host for ftp requests

Since you're on Windows, you can either do the following from the same command shell:

C:\> set http_proxy=http://proxy.sn.no:8001/
C:\> set ftp_proxy=http://proxy.sn.no:8001/
C:\> cpan 

and then try to install as before. Since your CPAN is using FTP, the ftp_proxy will need to be set (and yes, the URL for it will typically be an HTTP one).

You can also set the environment variables permanently in the system control panel, usually under advanced settings, environment variables. You can set them either for the system or for the current user. It's best not to set them for the whole system unless you have a very good reason.

You will have to figure out what the proxy actually is. Your browser should know, so have a look in its internet settings.

Answer 2

I had a similar issue, although the solutions here didn't fix it for me. I had just upgraded Strawberry Perl from 5.18.2.1 to 5.20.1.1 on three machines, and although CPAN worked on the two Windows 7 machines, it didn't on the Windows Server 2003 machine.

In the end, the thing that fixed it for me was to delete the CPAN configuration file, C:\strawberry\perl\lib\CPAN\Config.pm in my case. I started CPAN and did a reload index; it once again asked me for my credentials (which I don't need for the proxy I use) so I just hit enter twice to leave them blank, and it managed to connect and update its index.

I recall having previously seen warnings in the Strawberry Perl release notes to say to delete C:\strawberry after uninstalling the previous version and before installing the newer version. There doesn't seem to be such a warning this time round, but it's good practice anyway I suppose.

As an aside, a temporary workaround I used before managing to get CPAN working again was to copy across the lib, site and vendor directories from a machine on which I'd upgraded Perl already and on which CPAN did still work. This way, I had all the modules I needed without CPAN actually working. (The two machines were the same architecture, requiring the same installer to upgrade.)

Answer 3

This is easily firewall/proxy issues. You need to set up http_proxy variable in cpan. Enter the cpan shell by typing cpan at the shell command prompt, and hitting enter. Once in the cpan shell, enter the following:

o conf http_proxy http://proxy.mycorp.com:8080/

cpan may then ask you for the username and password so that you can use the proxy for http traffic, at least.

It's possible that your ftp access is blocked by the firewall. cpan will work around this.

• You can look to your browser if the proxy configuration is simple.
• If it is more complex, you'll have to
  • paste the URL to the config script in the browser address
  • open that URL with an editor when the browser prompts you (or use an editor that takes http URLs—like jEdit or Notepad++. ).

Once you parse the case for your location and CPAN, then you can take the server name returned, a the port if any, and either set the environment variable or cpan configuration with the value.

Answer 4

The CPAN configuration file in the Strawberry Perl environment is:

c:\Strawberry\perl\lib\CPAN\Config.pm .

Configuration definitions for a specific user are written in the MyConfig.pm file located under: C:\Users\user name\AppData\Local\.cpan\CPAN\. The proxy definitions can be overridden in one of these files.