Need Help Accessing my FTP Server.

because the ftp address was ftp.192.1....

Was your IP address 192.168.x.x? If so this is your problem. 192.168.x.x is a special reserved IP space for local networks that cannot be addressed from outside the network.

My address right now is 192.168.2.101 which works because I'm NATed behind my firewall/router. My public IP address is the one assigned to my router by my ISP - the router handles traffic from the net to the computer that it is intended for. If you want your server to be addressable from outside your company you'll need an actual IP address because there is no way to tell the difference between your 192.168.x.x address space and mine.

If you are on a 192.x.x.x space that is NOT 192.168.x.x then it could be a valid address space. In that case I would check your firewall settings (incoming) for the ftp port or perhaps even the outgoing ports of the hotspot provider. Can you ftp to other known servers from the same connections?

=Tod K

PS Also if you have web services running - and accessible to the outside world - you might consider WebDAV for file transfers if you're not too attached to ftp.


G5/2.0x2, G3/501, G3/233PB

For contact with outside world you need an IP address that is world addressable - 192.168.x.x is not.

At the very least you'll need an IP address assigned to you by whoever you're getting your Internet access from. If this is not a permanent IP address then you're going to have some real obstacles to overcome. If it is a lease based system - like DSL where you acquire an IP then it will be fairly static and you would be able to go home and use your leased IP eg 169.123.3.15. But if you ever drop your connection then you'll get a new leased IP that could be similar but different eg 169.123.3.101 and all your bookmarks will fail.

To address your server with a name you'll need a permanent IP address - then you can associate foo.com with that address. That way anytime someone types in foo.com they'll get your IP address from their DNS query. While you can do alot with traffic once it comes to your site you need DNS servers to resolve foo.com to your address to get that traffic to your site. Any local DNS changes you make will not allow traffic from your house to route to your office because the DNS you use to resolve foo.bar will not know who that is.

HTH,

=Tod

G5/2.0x2, G3/501, G3/233PB

OK lets take you to the answer...

So you now know your internal address and your external address (internal is the 192.x.y.z address and whatever is the external address such as 65.c.b.a or 12.i.h.g etc. etc.)

Anyone who wants to access the ftp server from OUTSIDE your network will access it via ftp://externaladdress/ and anyone inside your network will use ftp://internaladdress/.

As some others have pointed out, if your external address is non-static, that is to say that at any time [which is not controlable by you] your external address can change, your external users will be unable to access this ftp server with out you having to tell them the IP address has changed and what that change is...

To try to help with this, you can use a dynamic dns service such as DynDns which will allow you to run a piece of software on your server which will update your external address any time it changes so that all your users will be able to use an alias which points to your external ip address.

The alias name you choose for your server is almost without limit, for example, you could have your external address as photodude.dyndns.org etc and everyone will find you no matter what your external address is and even if it has changed 30 times in the last 5 days!

That would be THE easiest way to get this to work...

I am not sure why you say "to make sure that all 10 computers will not try to connect ia FTP". I thought the point of your question was to get users to access your server via FTP easily (and this is posted in the File Services section)

Peter

PowerMac G5 DP 2.5Ghz Mac OS X (10.4.3)