Cannot connect to FTP when firewall is turned on

When it's ON, what does System Profiler>Network>Firewall say are available services?

Might try turning on Remote Login/SSH, as I think that's Port 22 for sftp.

If neither of those work it might be a munged...
/Library/Preferences/com.apple.sharing.firewall.plist

Sorry, sometimes that file needs Trashing, rebooting and setting up Sharing again, but it doesn't "appear" to be the problem here.

Is there a Router involved perhaps that has Ports blocked?

Also, passive ftp not only uses Port 21, but needs some port above Port #1023 for communication...
http://slacksite.com/other/ftp.html

Might try Little Snitch...
http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html
to see what Port it/they are trying to use, and open that.

Not sure why I have no trouble using Passive ftp with my Firewall on, but I use TransmitX, though I think I've tried others OK.

I wonder if they aren't really using Active even though your trying Passive!?

Ports 1023-1026 won't help if it decides to use Port 61234!

Hmmm, does the Console logs tell us which ports are failing?

Is this an ftp site I might try, or is it a personal/closed one?

Hi, I'm dealing with this in another thread. I'll let you know if I come up with an answer. Bottom line is, even if you use passive mode to ftp to a server which does not accept it, you will be in active mode. That means the server will try to open a socket to you on some other port, either random or one more than the port used for the connection socket. Your firewall will block this new connection.

There are a series of rules for the firewall. If I can get it to accept connections from port 20 (not to, but from) then active ftp will work. But there seems to be no way to do this from OSX. There is a unix way, but then the kernel memory doesn't match the preferences file and OSX throws the equivalent of a hissy fit. There may be no way around it, but I'm looking into it.

-Phil

I found out how to do active mode ftp on a Mac and wrote it up in http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=868102&tstart=15

It's a fairly complicated solution, perhaps I'll write a script for it. It seems a lot simpler just to turn off the firewall.

-Phil

Powerbook G4, iMac (Intel), and tons of hardware sitting in the closet Mac OS X (10.4.8)

HI Ricky,

I found the solution and posted it here:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=868102&tstart=15

There are ways to make this more user-friendly, like piping the output to ~/Documents. So you could:

sudo ipfw list > ~/Documents/ipfw_list

and use Textedit to modify it. Or I could write a script.

-Phil