ActivePerl and PPM

Question

I have installed ActivePerl 5.14.2 on a Windows 32 bit machine running XP. My problem is that I'm trying to install a few modules with PPM and it's not working out.

According to ActiveState's website, all you need to do to install a module from their repository is "ppm install module name" , example: http://code.activestate.com/ppm/Template-Toolkit/

Every time I try this or any other module I get: "No Perl script found in input"

Even when I do just "ppm" I get the same message, even though the GUI should run.

When I run PPM with a GUI from the start menu I get this error: "Failed 500 Can't connect to ppm4.activestate.com:8080 (connect: timeout)”

I though that it might be my connection, so using cmd.exe I used the set HTTP_PROXY command and then tried ppm install, but still no luck. So is there any way I can get these modules installed?

Any advice is appreciated !!

Answer 1

Invoke the cpan prompt from your command prompt. Go to cmd and simply type cpan. If you successfully enter cpan prompt them there is probably no issues with your Perl installation. To install a module from cpan prompt just use

cpan>install Module::Name

Screenshot below shows command to install module Net::Stomp

If the above does not work, check if your FTP data and connection ports needs to be added to the Windows firewall exceptions (Ports 20 (FTP Command port) and 21 (FTP Data port)).

Alternatively (if you don't want to add port 20 21 to exception), you can go to the cpan prompt and use an ftp_proxy by

cpan> o conf ftp_proxy http://your.ftpproxy.com

and then issue install command. Or you can update your ../CPAN/config.pm file to make permanent changes to the ftp_proxy parameter.

The next step would be to try set the FTP_PASSIVE mode to 1. By default the libnetcfg configuration for this is set to 0. To change this find libnetcfg.bat file (should be somewhere C:\Perl\bin), open the file in an editor and replace

ftp_int_passive      0

to

ftp_int_passive      1

Again, looking at you r timeout error it seems that your network is blocking you from accessing the CPAN ftp mirrors, this would happen mostly if you are inside a corporate VPN. The solution to this can only be proxy servers.