Why is it that when I try to use cpan for the first time after a little while it takes an age for it to contact the sites and get going? I always have to go away and do something else and it might take 5 minutes for cpan to sart doing anything useful.
Two things come to mind - neither is authoritative, so adjust sodium levels accordingly.
The first is, cpan.org is a nonprofit on a limited budget, and ftp.cpan.org is not the fastest server on the planet. It gets hit *hard*.
The second is, I *think* that it tries a non-passive FTP transfer first. If you're behind a firewall - which many of us are these days, with shared broadband connections - that transfer will time out, and then it retries the transfer in passive mode. I think it uses the results of this initial test to establish the default passive setting in Config.pm.
sherm--
