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.

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.

I'm not exactly sure why you are being told this as it is not illegal, after all Active Mode is a way of transferring files just like Passive mode is.
The people telling you this where have they found it is apparently illegal?

This was on a forum for users of some web design software that has a built-in FTP client. I was saying that I couldnt use it because Freeola requires Active transfers, and this software doesnt allow me to switch to Active. One bloke in Australia said:

"... the standard here is Passive FTP. You can have Active as an adjunct to Passive, but to comply with the standard which is the law requires you to have Passive FTP - quite rightly so."

Anyway, my experience using WSFTP is that Passive transfers do still work, but very slowly. Using Active transfers, it works at the speed I was used to.

Am I right that Freeola changed this to improve security?

We are not aware of this being illegal, after all it is a transfer type normally used if behind a Firewall. I believe our logs are easier to follow with Active FTP.

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?

Thankfully, not many.

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.

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.

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.

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.