Artfactory not syncing org tree with jcenter

Question

I'm setting up a new atrifactory installation for the first time in my life. Downloaded the tar and extraceted it ok. Got some firewall rules in place to allow https to jcenter.bintray.com. After an initial refresh I see loads of artifacts in the com tree that must come from jcenter, so all seems fine, but when I preform simple maven tasks like mvn help:active-profiles I only get warnings and errors that indicate that none of the relevant stuff is available from my artifactory.

I have accessed the firewall logs and I found no outgoing traffic from my artifactory server to anything that's not permitted. What have I missed? My artifactory is OSS version 7.5.7 rev 705070900.

Answer 1

I found the issue, sort of. For reasons I now understand I have plugin repositories. I added the true source for the plugins to my list of plugin repositories, and that solved the issue for me.

Answer 2

Artifactory remote repositories are not working as a mirror or the external repository they are pointing at.
Remote Artifactory repositories are proxying the external repository, which means that you have to actively request for artifacts. When requesting for an artifact, Artifactory will request it from the external repository and cache it inside Artifactory. Farther requests for a cached artifact will be served from Artifactory without the need to go out to the external repository.
The list of artifacts we are seeing, are ones which are available in the external repository. This is a feature is called remote browsing and available for some of the package types supported by Artifactory.