gentoo/arch network install problem

[arthur]

I'm in a university in England, and one of the perks of the residences are blazing fast internet connections (LAN).

 

However, for some WEIRD reason, I can't install gentoo or arch linux. I can surf, wget, use links2, but portage/pacman always fails to update (emerge sync says, "temporary name resolution..." thing, pacman says download failed).

 

Now I know that this could just be the university firewall. but "emerge-webrsync" simply says "Getting latest portage tree" then goes back to the prompt. why shouldn't it work?

 

I tried to fix my non-existent portage tree by downloading the portage snapshot and unzipping it to the portage directory. now I have a tree, but "emerging" anything fails since the downloads fail (temporary name resolution problem again). It's almost like having internet access but no internet access, if you get what I mean. I can download everything manually but that would take forever :(

 

is this problem all in the firewall? btw, I can't ping at all, since it's also blocked. How do I scan a firewall to see which stuff is let through? any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

[ac_dispatcher]

Odd I wonder if your net is up at all.

 

As Root what does

 

#ifconfig

 

come out with?

 

Also in Gentoo you may want to check your resolv.conf. When you installed gentoo and booted to the cd did it have internet? Did you copy the resolf.conf

 

Also do you need to set a proxy?

 

From Gentoo Docs

Optional: Configure Proxy

 

If you access the Internet through a proxy, you might need to setup proxy information during the installation. It is very easy to define a proxy: you just need to define a variable which contains the proxy server information.

 

In most cases, you can just define the variables using the server hostname. As an example, we assume the proxy is called proxy.gentoo.org and the port is 8080.

 

Code Listing 1: Defining proxy servers

 

(If the proxy filters HTTP traffic)

# export http_proxy="http://proxy.gentoo.org:8080"

(If the proxy filters FTP traffic)

# export ftp_proxy="ftp://proxy.gentoo.org:8080"

(If the proxy filters RSYNC traffic)

# export RSYNC_PROXY="proxy.gentoo.org:8080"

 

If your proxy requires a username and password, you should use the following syntax for the variable:

 

Code Listing 2: Adding username/password to the proxy variable

 

http://username:password@server

 

For instance, for HTTP proxying with our previous proxy server and a username of "john" with a password of "f00b_r" one would use:

 

Code Listing 3: Authenticated Proxy

 

# export http_proxy="http://john:f00b_r@proxy.gentoo.org:8080"

 

During install did you

 

# nano -w /etc/conf.d/net

and then

# rc-update add net.eth0 default

 

Does you network card module need to be loaded at boot? Is it?

Edited September 25, 2004 by ac_dispatcher

[arthur]

my net is up all right, otherwise I wouldn't be able to download the stage tarball at all.

 

however, emerge-webrsync just says "getting the latest portage tree" then goes back to the prompt after five seconds.

 

But I've used a workaround - I used wget to download a portage snapshot and untarred it to the portage directory.

 

But when I try to emerge anything, it says "temporary name resolution failure" for each dependency. I could wget those files manually, but that would be tedious.

 

BTW, I'm using a 2004.0 minimal liveCD to install a stage3 2004.1, I don't think that should be a problem, do you? I've installed gentoo from stage1 before and didn't have this problem.

[arthur]

uh, forget this thread, it was just a matter of losing the nameserver each time I changed environments. sorry to have bothered you.