I thought this should be pretty easy, just login to the admin console for my Linksys BEFSR11 single port cable/DSL router and enable the port forwarding to the server on my private network.
It didn’t work. I could login from a remote server but I couldn’t get a directory listing. I did a little research on Google and found out that my problem was probably due to issues with Active vs Passive FTP. I’m embarrassed to admit that I had no idea that there were two different ways for FTP clients to behave.
I’m also a little disappointed that either this wasn’t covered in any of my MCSE texts, courses, and exams or that I had not bothered to record this information. Ironically the IIS exam was one of my best scores, 993, and I scored a perfect 1000 on the TCP/IP exam to achieve my MCSE for NT 4.
I was also further confused that I had not encountered this error previously with any of the firewalls that I had configured when I was an Admin at Federated Insurance. I guess the Shiva Firewall made things easy.
So I obsessed over getting this to work. I checked out the answer section at Linksys’ site and found that I need to open up both UPD and TCP and use ports 20 & 21. I configured the FTP forwarding as indicated by Linksys and I did receive some patial success.
I was able to FTP into the server from an external client but it had to be with passive mode turned off. Not a problem I thought, but I wanted to set this up so that I can post on Blogger and have the new posts FTPed by Blogger to my server at home. I’d rather have my blog on www.demetri.ca than on the blogspot address. A little in part to vanity but mostly because I’ve had demetri.ca registered for many years.
So I setup blogger for FTP and it was not able to connect. My speculation is that blogger only uses active FTP and therefore is just not going to work with the limited configuration I can do with my Linksys router.
So I decided to setup a Linux server and try SFTP to see if that would work and fortunately it worked no problem. All I needed to do was open up port 22 and point it to the Linux box … and of course spend a couple of hours installing Red Hat Linux (sorry to keep you waiting Heather) and configuring Apache for serving up my blog.
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>Hi Demetri,
Thanks for your blog and all of the links you included. I’m in the middle of setting up my own ftp server and spent the better part of last night and tonight trying to figure it all out. Your blog, plus the linksys answer pages really help me understand things better! Cheers in advance of me figuring it all out.