In order to perform catalogue lookups, autoastrom needs
to make HTTP (Web) queries. If your site enforces the use
of proxies to get access to the web, these lookups will
fail, and autoastrom will simply wait uselessly until its
queries time out.
You can tell autoastrom how to use the proxies by using the
standard http_proxy environment variable, which
you set through something like
orcsh% setenv http_proxy http://wwwcache.example.ac.uk:8080/
depending on whether you use a csh-like (tcsh) or sh-like (bash, zsh) shell.sh% http_proxy=http://www.example.ac.uk:8080/; export http_proxy
Your local computing service can advise you on the appropriate value for this environment variable, or you can examine the appropriate part of the configuration of your web browser.