Viewing Thread:
"Active or passive FTP"

A few weeks ago Freeola told us to change our FTP clients to use Active transfers because of a new more secure environment. Is that still the way it is? I can't see anything in the Freeola help pages to say one way or the other. I'm using "Active" and it works OK, but someone was saying to me that its illegal (???) to disallow passive transfers.

If you don't have a firewall, use active, if you do, use passive. That's about all there is to it. Active is marginally more efficient than passive, but active generally doesn't work behind firewalls.

Normally if you want to use a Firewall I would recommend Passive Mode, but other than that it is totally down to you which transfer mode you wish to use.

Almost forgot thankyou for testing that for me.

Hi - active and passive are both working from here on a 56K modem link, all with acceptable speed, including directory listings.

Does that mean we'll be OK now with either? Erm, so which is recommended?

Passive FTP Transfers should now be working, but it appears Active mode is now not working.
If possible anyone here with a Freeola hosted account can you test this for me whether active mode or passive ftp is working for you.

Well we have been looking into this for just over a month and have been trying to get out Techies behind the scenes to look into this for us, from what I can gather Passive transfers with most people will work up until it attempts to get a directory listing, when either it is sluggishly slow or times out.

I'll see if I can get an answer for this the start of next week.

Thanks all, I think the Aussie bloke was mistaken. Maybe what he was saying was that an ISP cannot purely offer Active, but has to have Passive available too.

I still don't quite understand though. Freeola's new setup "requires" active transfers. Sure, I get good FTP performance when I use that setting. But why is it still possible to operate passive transfers? Its very slow when I do, but surely if its a matter of security, they shouldnt work at all?

My limited understanding of the difference is that with passive transfers, the client tells the server it wants a connection; with active transfers, its the other way round, which is presumably more secure from the server's point of view.

As far as I know, there are standard laws like "no pictures of naked kids" and other laws like "keep your logs so we can catch people who look at naked kids", but apart from that, ISPs are governed by economics more than the law. This is good, because in my experience, where the law is concerned, it usually inteferes with the statutes that the Internet stand for - freedom of speech, information, etc.

Turbonutter wrote:
> Thankfully, not many.
Problems do occur for people not in the UK as laws in other countries differ, but I have never heard of any law for FTP.

Thankfully, not many.

Afternoon wrote:
> The people telling you this where have they found it is apparently
> illegal?

Bloody hell!

Anyway, why would it be illegal? They're Freeola's servers and they can choose to protect them any way they want.

Are there any laws in the UK regarding web hosting?