I've got an irritating ftp problem: whenever I'm down- or uploading stuff via ftp, the connection will randomly stall. It happens with different ftp clients (gftp, ncftp, my own php ftp scripts) and connecting to many different ftp servers, so I assume it's something else on my end. I can wake the connection up again (and the transfer resumes as normal) by pinging another domain, retrieving a web page etc, so I have temporarily been solving the problem by opening another aterm and running "ping -i 10 yahoo.com" while I'm doing FTP transfers. The transfer(s) still periodically stall but then are resumed by the ping every 10 seconds. This is a less than ideal solution and I'd like to get to the root of the problem. I'm using Slack 10.1 and 2.6.11.11. Anyone got any ideas?

Are you behind a nat router, did you try to set passive on or off before the transfer ?

Random stalls in protocols is often caused by high packet loss, either you have a bad line or perhaps your MTU is too large. The default 1500 bytes is too much for DSL lines with pppoe. Dropping to eg 1472 is often a cure.