Artifactory stopped caching

I've been using artifactory fine, but now it stopped caching dependencies that are located in the main maven repository.  

Looking at the log file, I can see that it failed to retrieve indexes.  Would this stop artifactory from caching?

Is there a way to manually refresh indexes?   I need to manually open the firewall which I do while I'm working.  (too long of a story to describe here).   So, doing indexing on a cron is not very useful.

--Kurt