[BioC] Installing bioconductor from behind a firewall

[Michael Hoffman]

I have been trying to install Bioconductor on a HP alpha running OSF1
from behind a firewall that blocks outgoing port 80 and have had
little success. We are required to use an HTTP proxy for all of our
outgoing requests.

Using getBioC() with method="wget" does not work because getBioC()
tries to get many files using url() instead of download.file(), and so
the specified method is not used.

Is there an easy way to download the packages ahead of time and
install them without needing an Internet connection during the install
process?
-- 
Michael Hoffman <hoffman at ebi.ac.uk>
European Bioinformatics Institute