[ILUG] Strange FTP problem

[Niall O Broin]

A colleague of mine recently upgraded his internet access from ISDN to ADSL
and has encountered a strange FTP problem. It seems most likely that the
problem is related to the 3Com ADSL router which also does NAT for his
network but as the problem is only on one server (so far) I'm hoping I can
resolve it on the server side. 

The problem is that when he connects to the server and gets data (e.g. does
an ls) the client hangs. We've been in touch with the author of wu-ftpd and
he suggested that recompiling wu-ftpd and giving the --enable_bad_clients to
configure might work because some clients incorrectly don't wait for a close
from the remote end. Tried that, didn't work :-(

The curious thing is that it's only on this one server which is running
RH6.2. If I take a copy of the ftpd binary (a slightly earlier version of
wu-ftpd) which is running on another server (RH5.3) the problem still exists.

As I write this it occurs to me that this might be kernel related, the two
mentioned boxes having different kernel versions, (the working one has 2.2.6
and the non working 2.2.14), but as these boxes are colo'ed in the US kernel
upgrades are a tad tricky. Two kernel monte would help, but I'd have to
compile a kernel with TKM support - anyone see the problem here :-)  ?


Suggestions welcome - very welcome, even.




Regards,


Niall

P.S. One good suggestion is obviously to use scp which I am trying to
persuade him to do. Mind you, he's a Mac user and I'm sure he'll miss his
cute Macintosh GUI FTP client.