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Stale mirrors in CPAN

cbrooks on 2002-11-13T15:34:22

This might be helpful to someone else -- the last few times that I've tried to install modules using CPAN.pm, the installation has hung as LWP tried to retrieve the source files across FTP. It turns out that the problem is with stale CPAN mirrors -- a simple lynx ftp://ftp.insert-your-mirror-here.com showed that over half of the mirrors in my $CPAN::Config->{ 'urllist' } were not accessible. Once I removed the non-responding URLs, I was able to install modules again.

Stale mirrors in CPAN

brian_d_foy on 2002-11-13T19:42:17

Now I wonder how many stale mirrors are in the SITES file. I have been tracking the number of hosts for a bit, and occasionally posting the results on Perl At a Glance. The numbers do not mean much if a lot of bad entries are in there.

I suppose I should start pinging all of the sites and tracking unreachable ones too. I should have that sort of code lying around somewhere. :)

Re:Stale mirrors in CPAN

cbrooks on 2002-11-13T21:25:46

mirrors.cpan.org has lots of great information -- I especially like the mirror frequency and approximate bandwidth.

Re:Stale mirrors in CPAN

hfb on 2002-11-14T15:24:52

You might have also noticed http://mirror.cpan.org/status.cgi which is the result of 2 machines on 2 continents running the same script to check the freshness and speed.

Re:Stale mirrors in CPAN

jhi on 2002-11-14T15:52:56

...run for times a day. The continents being
Europe as seen from the CPAN master site in Finland and North America as seen from California.

Re:Stale mirrors in CPAN

jhi on 2002-11-14T15:53:31

Gngngng. s/for/four/

Re:Stale mirrors in CPAN

hfb on 2002-11-14T15:30:10

Brian, maybe you might look on the left side of the mirrors web site the next time you go by and click the link that says "Status of the Mirrors".

Re:Stale mirrors in CPAN

jhi on 2002-11-14T15:55:08

No need, really... see below answers from hfb and me.