[tex-live] tlmgr ftp issues?

[Lars Madsen]

Tim Bradshaw wrote:
> Hi, apologies if this is a known problem or my diagnosis is wrong - I 
> haven't been using TeX Live very long.
> 
> I have the 2009 distribution, and I wanted to see if I could use tlmgr 
> to install updates.  I'm on a mac, which has both the mac application 
> firewall turned on, and is also behind a router with firewall and NAT.  
> So "traditional" ftp does not work, it needs to use passive ftp.
> 
> I did an update of tlmgr itself ("sudo tlmgr update --self") which 
> worked fine.
> 
> Now if I try, say "sudo tlmgr update --list" two things happen:
> 
> - I get an alert from the mac firewall saying do I want to let perl 
> accept incoming network connections, to which I answer "no" (saying 
> "yes" isn't going to help since there is another firewall in the way, 
> but in any case I definitely do not want to let perl accept incoming 
> connections);
> 
> - tlmgr sits there for a very long time (long enough for me to type 
> this) before producing the list.
> 
> If I have a poke around with lsof / netstat I can see that it has a 
> listening socket open on a high port number, as well as an outgoing 
> socket to ftp.tex.ac.uk.
> 
> So, my guess (I have looked at the source, but only a bit), is that it's 
> trying to do traditional ftp and failing, then falling back to something 
> else (wget or curl?).  There has been a thread in in comp.text.tex where 
> someone suggested using the -no-persistent-downloads option, which does 
> indeed resolve the problem.
> 
> If that's a correct diagnosis, then I think tlmgr should be changed so 
> it uses passive ftp by default (or at least has a configuration option 
> to do so), since I suspect that traditional ftp (active ftp?) will work 
> only in a vanishingly small number of cases nowadays.
> 
> Thanks
> 
> --tim

couldn't you just use a mirror that make use of HTTP instead of FTP

(why do firewalls keep people in, shouldn't it keep people out?)


-- 

/daleif