Hello,
In April I became the administrator of an HPC cluster system, and I noticed recently that attempting to access https://bioconductor.org from the cluster system gives a 403 Forbidden HTTP error. Other machines on our university network can access the site fine, but it is not possible within this cluster system.
To get around this problem I created a local BioC mirror here in my lab(rsync mirroring works even though http does not), however the BioC installer still fails when it attempts to access http://bioconductor.org/BiocInstaller.dcf during the BioC install.
From looking at the configuration on this cluster system, it appears as though the previous admin may have configured BioC poorly(on 20-30 machines) in the past which I suspect could have lead to our IP being banned for abuse by the admins of bioconductor.org.
Can this IP ban be lifted or can the BioC installer be modified to pull the BiocInstaller.dcf file from the configured mirror rather than the main bioconductor.org? I would also be interested to e-mail or private message with one of the admins so that I can confirm my cluster system is no longer configured in a way that causes problems.
After looking at the source for the BiocInstaller package I found a variable I can set to work around this, and googling it pulled up this answer:
Offline loading of BiocInstaller or depending packages and connection timeout
This workaround seems like it will be okay for the time being, but I still think it would be good if this file were to be loaded from the configured mirror rather than being hardcoded to the main site and only disabled through an undocumented option.
It's actually retrieving information from the bioconductor _web_ site, rather than package repository; most local mirrors are of the package repositories. I'll document the option (to use the local DCF) more clearly; it comes with a limitation that after the final build of a release, the local file is necessarily out-of-date.