osol 2008.11 ips network timeout

I'm running OpenSolaris 2008.11 in VirtualBox at work. My workstation only has access to the internet and the ips authorities through a proxy. So setting the following environment variables initially worked:

export HTTP_PROXY="http://username:password@proxy:port"

But trying to install larger packages (ruby) resulted in network timeouts and didn't really work. Today i stumbled upon two undocumented variables which finally solved my issues.

PKG_CLIENT_TIMEOUT number of seconds to wait before socket gets timed out

PKG_TIMEOUT_MAX number of attempts

Ready to do some puppet source code hacking (ok building solaris packages more up to date then the ones in blastwave).