[OS X TeX] Very (Mac)-specific mpm problem

[Alan Munn]

For those of you using the MikTeX package manager, I have a problem 
that I don't really know how to go about solving. As far as I can 
tell, it's a weird interaction between mpm and my particular (and 
somewhat esoteric) networking situation.

I have a G5 machine that uses a shared internet connection through 
another G5.  So the network configuration is the following:

G5(a) -- via ethernet -- G5(b) -- via airport -- base station -- DSL modem

So on G5(b) I have internet sharing turned on, and the firewall 
turned off (which is fine since everything is behind the Airport 
router anyway.)

This is necessary because G5(a) doesn't have airport and the base 
station is too far away to connect to it directly.

Now to the mpm part:

I just installed mpm on G5(a) and it doesn't seem to be able to 
connect.  So if I enter

% mpm --update-db

Nothing happens for a while (in the order of minutes), and then 
finally I get the following message:

mpm: The cURL easy interface returned error code 8

This error code is supposedly

>CURLE_FTP_WEIRD_SERVER_REPLY (8)
>
>After connecting to an FTP server, libcurl expects to get a certain 
>reply back. This error code implies that it got a strange or bad 
>reply. The given remote server is probably not an OK FTP server.

Now internet connections work fine on this machine, e.g. web 
browsing, e-mail and curl itself (i.e. % curl <url>  correctly 
retrieves the URL.)

My question is how do I go about figuring out what is going wrong so 
that I can even report it to the MikTeX tools developers.  I tried 
adding the --trace option to the command, but it produces nothing. 
Similarly, the system log shows nothing.

I use mpm on two laptops (a Macbook Pro and a G4) via Airport, both 
without any difficulty.

This is probably too weird for anyone to help, but I thought I'd ask...

Thanks

Alan

-- 
Alan Munn                                                   amunn at msu.edu
Department of Linguistics                                   amunn at acm.org
and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages   Fax.  +1-517-432-2736
Michigan State University, East Lansing MI 48824    Tel.  +1-517-355-7491
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