[plug] Problem with gFTP

[Keith Bawden]

On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 23:54, Bret Busby <bret at busby.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 2 Jul 2008, Keith Bawden wrote:
> I had been advised to turn off the passive mode in gftp.
>
> When doing a mouseover of the check box for "Passive file transfer", a
> dialogue box was displayed, that included in the text displayed, "If you are
> behind a firewall, you will need to enable this.".

Did you ignore this advice from the GUI and try anyway? Process of
elimination is the key here. If it works with one ftp client and not
the other then it would suggest it may be a config error in gftp or a
bug.

> When I did "man ftp", and looked at the options, and then used "ftp -v" to
> connect with one of my web sites, and then ran the command status, the
> response did not include indication of whether active or passive, file
> transfer was set.

During the initial connection did you see the word PASV. If so then
you are using passive mode. You can force the use of passive mode -
"ftp -p" . If it fails with -p then you know the problem is with using
passive mode.

If your command line ftp client is not capable of verbose logging then
you might want to take lftp for a spin and turn debugging up high [1].

> What concerns me about this, is that, until recently, I had been able to use
> gftp, without any (remembered) problems in using gftp; and I had always used
> only the default configuration settings in gftp (from memory).

Maybe the admin at the other end got nasty on you and reconfigured
things without letting you know... Or maybe you have updated gFTP and
uncovered a new bug et cetera...

> I am aware of only two significant recent changes; the first is that we
> switched the ISP that provides access to the Internet, and, the second is
> that we have now gone from ADSL1 to ADSL2 access to the Internet.

Does your new ISP do the crappy thing of filtering traffic and
blocking certain ports? If so some ISPs will allow you to request the
removal of these "safety" features.

On final point. If gFTP has poor or no loggin functionality then you
may have to rely on tcpdump (or some such tool) and take a look at
what is going across the wire.

Regards, Keith

[1] lftp should be available via your package manager and a good
tutorial is here - http://tutorials.papamike.ca/pub/lftp.html