[ILUG] Re: [IIU] ftp to iol.ie

[Padraig Brady]

Same thing happens from behind a firewall and a linux ftp client
and direct dialup from a windoze 95 box. It's working now
from the linux client (probably cos they rebooted something?)
but it wasn't yesterday. Note I can hit ftp.iol.ie fine always,
just iol.ie causes the problem.

Looks like it's time to change ISPs.

Padraig.

Nick Hilliard wrote:

> Padraig,
> 
> As far as I can tell, IOL's server is working just fine, as it has been
> (with the exception of a period around christmas, where it suffered a
> hardware failure and was out for a couple of days).  However, this is an
> outsider's viewpoint, and for the canonical answer, I'd suggest that you ask
> IOL - who will almost certainly tell you that there are no known problems
> with the service at the moment.
> 
> The reason I say this is that a colleague of mine uses the IOL ftp server
> every day for uploading many megs of data.  If there's a problem with it, he
> whinges at me and I get to hear about it.
> 
>> But it's got to the stage now where it's completely
>> unusable. I rang support @ one stage (about 3 months
>> ago) and they said that they knew there was a problem
>> and they were fixing it.
> 
> Incidentally, this is exactly why ISP's are so loathe to admit that problems
> ever occur.  People with persistent problems at their end ring up on the day
> that a service is down and get told "yes, there's a problem and we're
> working on it at the moment".  Then the ISP problem gets fixed, but theirs
> doesn't, and the net result is that things don't improve as far as they're
> concerned.  However, they remember that service was down, and mistakedly
> connect the two scenarios, and then blame the ISP for being unable to fix a
> problem in N months and providing a shite service. When I worked with IOL,
> this happened more times than I care to remember.
> 
> I'm not saying that long term ISP problems don't occur - they do.  However,
> they occur much less frequently than many people like to believe.
> 
>> So does anyone know anyone in iol who can help.
>> I remember helping fix a weird MTU size problem with 
>> Barry Flanagan I think, years ago, and he knew his stuff.
>> Is he still there? please help.
> 
> Barry is long gone, as is the weird MTU problem which you're probably
> referring to (fixed in about 1997).
> 
>> Anyway normal ftp mode gives "File Error" when the
>> ftp server tries to make the data connection back to me.
>> When going the other way (passive mode) I get "Passive mode 
>> failed: socket: No buffer space available".
> 
> Is there a firewall between you and IOL's ftp server?  If so, I'll bet that
> that's what's causing the problems.  Things to look for are: 1) disabling
> all ICMP packets (thereby disabling IP MTU discovery - you absolutely *must*
> permit ICMP unreachables for this reason) and 2): not permitting IP packet
> fragments to come through the firewall.
> 
> If this isn't the problem, perhaps you could let us know what sort of
> software / operating system youre using and maybe we could offer more
> suggestions as to what the real problem is?
> 
> Nick