maven repository manager

After struggling for a couple of days, I finally managed to set up a local maven repository behind a proxy.

• I first tried nexus, but it's configuration is very buggy and despite the fact that it don't work for me, it keeps on forgetting my settings if I open on it again.
• Then I tried artifactory, ant it too looked promising, but for some reason I could not get it to download stuff through a proxy either. To be fair after I figured out that my real problem as that my maven clean plugin was broken, I managed to get artifactory working through a proxy (but I think I like archiva the most at the moment).
  
• Then I tried apache archiva, which looked even more promising since it actually had the concept of a network proxy on its configuration screen. After a lot of googling, I found out that its a known (and fixed but un-released) bug in archiva 1.1. (http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MRM-884). So I installed version 1.0.2 and my downloads began to work!!
  

The only problem was that as part of testing if this works, I deleted the org directory in my maven repository (as described in the nexus section of the maven difinitve guide).
This caused my `mvn clean` to stop working:
"org.apache.maven.plugin.version.PluginVersionNotFoundException: The plugin 'org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-clean-plugin' does not exist or no valid version could be found"
After a bit of googling I found out that deleting my repository (~/.m2/repository) fixes this problem!
(http://www.mail-archive.com/users@maven.apache.org/msg68288.html)

A last note is that the different repository mangers are surprisingly similar as to how they work and configured. It must be something to with where they all come from.