Setting up proxy on gentoo

Hey guys i installed the minimal iso installer of gentoo on my virtual box, all went well and now im trying to follow the x86 handbook. our internet is under a proxy server i tried this:

export http_proxy="http://proxy.server.net:8080"

but still um unable to ping any site.

Ping doesn't use port 8080. Your proxy server is exclusively for use by web browsing software. It doesn't work for other network applications. Therefore you cannot use the ping utility to test the proxy server and, to turn the same rule around, the proxy server will not route your ping packets to the Internet.

so what i did on the export is right?

how do i check if its ok?

the links command and traceroute command that i tried to test connectivity fails

It sounds like the machine that you are working on is attached to a network that you did not configure yourself. I say this because it is clear that you have absolutely no knowledge of network configuration.

Try using a machine that is simply running Windows and see if you can ping other computers on the Internet. If so then you may be having the same trouble that many other people have written about here concerning network problems on a guest OS under a virtual machine application.

I would strongly urge you to keep your computer experiments at home. You can really screw up a business LAN by trying to set up network software on a computer when you have no idea what you are doing. If you are doing this in a work environment then your employer should terminate your employment for what you are trying to do.

Finally figure it out, in my gentoo box i only have links. eventhough i have set it up:

export http_proxy="http://proxy.server.net:8080"

this only works in my centos5

for this to work you also have to set this up in the links setup (network options)