I think this issue can be closed. There were several local issues that I addressed. First, I needed to address SSL certificate problem.
Then, I ran into an obscure ERROR about “packfile trailer mismatch”, which was due to hitting home directory size quota while checking out METADATA.jl into ~/.julia/v0.6.
Once I symlinked ~/.julia to a local drive with no quota, things started to work as expected.
Thanks for looking at the issue though.