FTP connection problems

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Someone is having difficulties with transferring files by FTP, I suggested using something other than Windows FTP software as it's usually read me

Problems persisted so I said to open FTP from a command prompt. It connected to the site and requested user name - entered (no problems)
requested password - entered (terminated by remote host)

I'm under the impression that this is caused by firewalling on his connection, is this so (I checked that windows firewall et al were off)? If not any ideas of what to do?

If it is the internet connection (he's in a hotel in Dubai) is there anything I can do other than ring the hotel (would some sort of web based port redirection service work?)?


Lots of question marks here so any help would be gratefully received

Thanks

FULLY star out swear words please
-Berserker
 
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Id get him to try a dedicated FTP client. I recommend Filezilla as it is free and fully featured and has support for both standard FTP and SFTP. The fact that he can connect using the command-line suggests it isn't a firewall problem. If push comes to shove he can fall back to the command line and use GET and PUT to transfer files
 
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He can't connect using command line - it chucks him out before connecting (hence - terminated by remote host) which is why I'm having such a problem

Some firewalling protocols don't perform a simple block on ports and I've seen similar errors with firewalled systems.

If it is firewalling then any ideas how to circumvent, if not what do people think the fault is???
 
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OK, a bit more background on how FTP works "behind the scenes". It uses 2 ports, 20+21 by default (21 for control, 20 for data). What looks like is happening is that 21 is open and allowed through (hence why he can authenticate) but 20 is blocked. My advice therefore would be connecting with FTP in passive mode (which doesnt use port 20 for data- it uses a random port from 1024 upwards). Alternatively (and perhaps a preferable solution considering your user is sending his login details in the clear across 3000 miles of cable) would be to enable and enforce SSH/SFTP on the server side.

p.s. You do realise you asked exactly the same question in the Linux forum right??
 
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At the start of the post in the other forums I prefaced the post with - asked this in .... sorry was a bit desperate and no one seemed to be answering

Interestingly I'd already set the FTP to passive mode as I was aware of the port problem which was why I was so flummoxed as to why it accepted a connection but cut out on authentication (I've made sure they were entering the correct details and it said connection terminated by remote host not login details incorrect). Any more ideas?

p.s. I checked port 22 and it's blocked :(
 
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I know port 22 is SSH but in a post someone made they suggested ignoring FTP and using SFTP/SSH which does use port 22

Anyone know of any good ideas of how I'd use port 80 to transfer files short of using web based email?
 
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I tried setting up port forwarding so that SSH would run over port 80 but the hotel must have some form of protocol checking (I'm told that the this is becoming more common).

This is so frustrating why do people provide internet connections and then put up so many barriers that they become unusable!!!???? It would be quicker to send each packet by mail on a floppy disk at this rate, arrrrgh.
 
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Hmm I know it can be a bit frustrating but you can understand their stance- after all they are (essentially) allowing ANYONE to connect ANY equipment to their network without ANY supervision- of course they're going to lock it down pretty tightly. Unfortunately as soon as you need to do something other than basic web browsing you're kinda stuffed :|

Another approach may be to adopt some form of web-based upload/download site- should be fairly easy to cobble together in PHP and there are bound to be plenty ready-made examples on the web. Not a real solution I know but I honestly can't think of any other way around this, unless your workplace provides some form of proxy server.
 
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