On a computer behind a firewall, gnorpm hangs if one tries to access the "preferences" dialog, for example, to change the http proxy settings. The hang is in a connect() call to tcp/www.redhat.com:80. Such connections ("direct web browsing") are blocked by our site firewall. At our site, all outgoing http traffic is required to go through an http proxy (squid). The problem is that it is impossible to tell gnorpm to use the proxy via the gnorpm preferences gui, because of the above-described hang. Maybe the proxy settings should be added to the gnorpm command line? At the least, a GUI-less way to specify the proxy settings should be documented in the gnorpm man page and in "gnorpm --help" message.
I too find that gnorpm hangs in this situation. Two workarounds come to mind: 1. Set an ipchains redirection of port 80 to 8080, 2. Take down the interface temporarily so allow the options panel of gnorpm to become available, and set the proxy. Needs some application-independent way for gnorpm to be aware of the proxy, perhaps /etc/sysconfig/proxy.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 19057 ***