Comment 7 for bug 983559

No luck. Both commands hang at the download. However, I have discovered that the problem is not with finding the proxy settings (which are found correctly -- it may not even be necessary to explicitly set the proxies from the environment; this seems to be urllib's default behaviour). The script does download the file to a location in /tmp/ -- but it doesn't do anything once the download is complete.

I made a minimal test case in python which reproduces this behaviour. My script completes the download and exits normally if I change the url to the Google homepage, but fails to exit if the url is the location of the flash tarball. I don't know whether this is related to the file size or the server -- if I try to download a much smaller file from the same directory in the Canonical archive it doesn't work. If I upload the tarball to another rempte server and try to download it from there, it still doesn't work.

I can use my test case to download the tarball from my local server, but only if I also unset all my proxy environment variables (and don't set them in urllib). (I don't know why that is necessary; I use the local network's domain name for my local server, and I can download the file with wget with all the environment variables set).

I suppose that I could use this as an elaborate workaround to install both the necessary packages, but I would really like to understand the underlying cause of the problem.

My proxy is cntlm. It shouldn't require authentication (it takes care of the authentication required by the upstream NTLM proxy).