ports & packages: problems with fetch

[Brian Sheehan]

Hi,

I've recently been having problems with the ports/packages system on a 
newly installed 4.10-RELEASE FreeBSD machine. Some port/package 
installations would fail, making it seem that a large proportion of 
package repositories where out of date, and that only a small number 
were up to date. I more or less solved the problem, but I'm posting this 
here as it took quite a lot of fiddling to  overcome it, and it took me 
a while to cop what the actual problem was: a dodgy proxy server between 
me and the freeBSD repositories.

Some port / package installations would fail with:

fetch: 
ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/local-distfiles/<name-of-port>: 
size unknown

If the file were fetched manually, the same "size unknown" warning would 
be displayed, but fetch would actually go ahead and download the file 
anyway. If the file were placed in /usr/ports/distfiles, installation 
would sometimes work. In cases where it didn't, an inspection of the 
downloaded .tar.gz file with cat showed it to in fact contain a http 
error response from the proxy server I was using. Fetching the same 
files from a machine outside the firewall worked perfectly.

Solution:
I tried a different proxy server in the organisation where I work - it 
is administered by a different department than the one I was using, and 
seems to work reliably with fetch.

Does this sound like a reasonable explanation to people? If so, which 
proxy servers are know to be problematic?

Brian