I'm having trouble connecting with a web server from my home PC running Fedora Core 4. I can establish the connection and log in, and then I can switch directories and do things that require no response from the server. If I try to do anything that should result in data being sent back to me, even just a directory listing using ls, however, I get no response and the command just times out.

This is exactly the same behavior I saw the first time I tried to do this, but at that time I was able to fix it by disabling passive mode, which was necessary since the web server in question does not allow passive mode ftp connections.

That worked fine for a month or two, then I didn't need to do any transfers for a while, and then when I returned, I got the behavior described above, even when I explicitly issue the PASSIVE command.

FYI, I do not have this problem if I reboot into windows 2K, which I have on the same machine for just this kind of situation. That seems to indicate that it's not a problem with the web server, my ISP, my router and its firewall, or anything else outside of my PC.

Any ideas?

thanks in advance,
Bruce E.

Actually it does. It would seem that some settings on the server have changed, and your windows ftp client is being informed about them. It's a bit like some web pages working in IE but nothing else because they were designed especially to account for the ways that IE dosn't work.

Have you tried using "ftp" from the cli?

Yup - same behavior, whether from the command line or using a GUI-driven client.

I'll contact the web hosting people to see if maybe they made some changes that W2K would pick up automatically, as you suggested.

Thanks - Bruce

I have a similar problem - but only for outside users (WAN users). The FTP client logs on but then when it asks for a listing, it says the host machine took too long to respond. I tried it using IE, Firefox, SmartFTP and my client that uses FileZilla also has problems.

When I tried to logon using the command line in Windows though, it worked just fine. I could list and download just fine.

The weird thing is, sometimes I get to log on using all the programs mentioned above - but this times are mostly at night.

I can log on SSH no problem from the outside, so I know it's not a firewall issue. I can log onto the FTP server sometimes with some programs, so it's not a network or port issue.

The question is... why does it fluctuate?

[edit] My firewall is also disabled.

Thanks

My firewall is also disabled.