For important security-related reasons, University of Manchester computational platforms are not accessible directly from outside the campus, nor can UoM platforms directly access Web and FTP sites which are off-campus.
Instead Web and FTP downloads are made via the University Web-proxy. However, some applications cannot use the Web-proxy, including those that access off-site genomics databases as part of the computational work on, for example, The Computational Shared Facility (CSF).
To solve this problem, Research Infrastructure team have introduced a proxy service (more accurately, a network address translation service – NATaaS). Users who wish to download data-sets as part of their computational work should contact the Research Infrastructure Team.
Research IT News 