Problem connecting to external ftp site
 

G'day Folks,
I have recently installed an adsl modem/router on my lan which contains RH9 and XP. All is well apart from i cannot now connect to an external ftp site from any of my pc's.. I have enabled port 21 on the router for tcp and udp, what else can i try?

Cheers
kman2045

If you have a firewall then this sometimes causes problems with FTP. The problem being that the client is free to choose any port it wishes for data transfer. Unless your firewall employs some kind of connection tracking there is no way the router can distinguish between an incoming connection from a pre established FTP session or any other inbound connection.

Fortunatly many FTP clients take this into account and enable you to connect to the server in passive mode, allowing the server to choose the data transfer port rather than the client. My advice would be to check the documentation for your FTP client and find out how to connect in passive mode. This will then solve your problem.

Thanks for your reply. I have tried using gftp on RH9 & WSFTP on XP, both in passive mode and receive the message back saying connection refused. If i use the upload program from the ftp site then this works ok so i know my account is ok but this is a very slow way to upload my files. Also another thing, i noticed that i was able to access another ftp site without any problems at all.

Cheers
kman2045