Hi Everyone.

My Debian (Etch) server has vsftpd installed on it and everything seems to be working correctly, except this scrambling problem.
When remote users upload, say an mp3 file, it gets jumpy and incorrectly put together on the server.

I imagine it could be a bad connection or something, maybe bad NICS. I'm trying it on another NIC now.

My remote friend tells me he gets kicked a lot of times, the connection times out etc.

I am was behind a OpenBSD box yesterday but installed pfSense, in case that was the problem, but it wasn't.

Does anyone have an idea how to fix this or how to troubleshoot it?

Here is my vsftp.conf

CODE]listen=YES
xferlog_file=/var/log/vsftpd.log
anonymous_enable=NO
local_enable=YES
write_enable=YES
#anon_upload_enable=NO
#anon_mkdir_write_enable=NO
xferlog_enable=YES
data_connection_timeout=6000
nopriv_user=ftp
chroot_local_user=YES
#ls_recurse_enable=YES
ascii_download_enable=YES
ascii_upload_enable=YES

hide_ids=YES
ssl_enable=YES
ssl_tlsv1=YES
ssl_sslv2=NO
ssl_sslv3=NO
rsa_cert_file=/etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.pem
allow_anon_ssl=NO
force_local_data_ssl=YES
force_local_logins_ssl=YES
#max_clients=0
#max_per_ip=0
pasv_min_port=65000
pasv_max_port=65030
userlist_enable=YES
userlist_file=/etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.user_list
listen_port=15001

# Debian customization
secure_chroot_dir=/var/run/vsftpd
pam_service_name=vsftpd
[/CODE]

The time out was the default 300 sec, last time my friend tried,
I don't know if it will help.

I'm also using XFS on the partition with the ftp directory.

I've tried withe to different friends, and it's the same problem with both of them.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I've been looking into sftp with chroot etc, but that's a lot of hassle.
I would rather just get this working.

And if this thread does not belong in the networking forum, please move it. I just thought it would be the most appropriate place to post it.

Jon

This could have any of a large number of possible causes. Your server might be overloaded. You might have problems with hardware. Your friend might have problems with his computer.

The first thing that I would do is check the system logs to see if there are messages that would help determine what is going wrong. Depending on how your system is configured you should look in /var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog at a minimum.

I would install Wire Shark (formerly Ethereal) and watch the packets.

You should run Wire Shark on all of the computers involved, not necessarily at the same time.

If you have a lot of dropped packets + a lot of packets out of order you may have a bad NIC somewhere in the path between your server and your client for example.

You can also try other things like running ping for a long time between the client and the server. See if the traffic is smooth or intermittent.

You can also try enabling other network services on the server and testing their performance. The client could pound away at services like finger or rwho or other things that normally should not be enabled. Again you would be watching packets via Wire Shark looking for dropped packets, corrupt packets, retransmitted packets, out of order packets, and delays.

That's where I would start.

Hi.

Thanks for the reply.

I have looked in the logs etc. but there doesn't seem to be any error messages.
I figure it might be easier to try to set up rssh instead of the troubleshooting, so maybe I'll try that first.

But anyway, thanks for the reply.

Jon