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I am trying to set up a FTP server under Windows XP.

Everything works fine with FireFox, but not with GetRight or IE.

Any ideas on how I can get it working with IE and GetRight?

System Setup

I've tried both XLight and Gene6 FTP.

On my router, I'm forwarding ports 30100 to 30110 to my local machine which is 192.168.1.64.

I have configured the listening port to be 30100.

I have configured the PASV port range to be 30101 to 30110.

I have set up an anonymous FTP account.

On another computer with an external internet connection (via WiFi to the next building), I can browse to ftp://91.195.X.X:30100/. Everything works fine with FireFox, but not with GetRight and IE.

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Update: Both GetRight and IE hang on "Connected, setting up data connection ...". FireFox works fine. – Gravitas Jul 7 '09 at 14:51
Update: Windows firewall was turned off the whole time. – Gravitas Jul 7 '09 at 15:01
Update: everything is working 100% now. Thanks guys! – Gravitas Jul 7 '09 at 18:44
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2 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

The problem is that your server might bugger up when the client is trying to use passive FTP. With normal FTP, your client tells the server what IP and port to send the data to. With passive FTP, it's the other way round - you ask the server for an IP and port, connect to that, and get the data.

Now, the problem here is that when generating the passive request, the server needs to send its IP. If the server is behind a home router, it will most likely not have a public IP, and thus the only IP it knows of itself will be 192.168.1.64.

When it transtmits that IP to the client, though, it won't work, since those IPs are not routable and will up ending nowhere or someplace totally different.

With linux, there's a module for the NAT setup that 'rewrites' these calls, but most home routers won't have those.

So, what you have to do is give the FTP server your external IP address. The most hassle-free way can be achieved if you can give a hostname to your server. Then you just need to sign up for a service like DynDNS and give that hostname to the server.

If that is not an option, you will have to manually give the server its new IP and erstart it after each new internet connection.

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Spot on! Installed FileZilla, and I was up and running with everything working 100% within about 3 minutes. Now Firefox, IE and GetRight work like a charm. Thanks for pointing out the need for an external IP. Despite a whole lot of searching in Gene6, I couldn't find this option - and since FileZilla is working fine, I don't need Gene6 FTP any more. – Gravitas Jul 7 '09 at 18:40
As an aside, I'm using myDynIPPro to automatically update my IP address which is a domain name hosted on www.dnsmadeeasy.com. Now I can refer to my server as ftp.mydomain.com:30100 – Gravitas Jul 7 '09 at 18:43
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up vote 1 down vote

Have you tried something like: ftp://anonymous@91.195.X.X:30100?

I can't speak for Xlight or Gene6, but I have had no problems with FileZilla Server on Windows XP.

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Thanks, I'll try that. – Gravitas Jul 7 '09 at 18:19
FileZilla works like a charm! Together with the comments above, it took me 3 minutes to get everything set up and running. – Gravitas Jul 7 '09 at 18:42
And - thank you, thank you, thank you - appreciate the time you've taken to answer this question. – Gravitas Jul 7 '09 at 18:44
No problem. It has some nice features like SSL FTP (that works out of the box) and a nice XML config that's easy to parse and manipulate with scripts. – moshen Jul 7 '09 at 19:10
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