aof.palin

I've encountered the exact same problems as the original poster.

Several machines on my home network have FTP enabled. One is WinXP SP1, one is WinXP SP2, and one is Win2k3 Server, the rest ar all flavors of linux. If I have my firewall's port forwarded to either the SP1, 2k3, or linux servers I am able to access their ftp resources just fine from outside my firewall. The SP2 installation does not allow access to its ftp resources from outside the firewall. All installations allow access to their ftp resources from inside the firewall.

There is no software firewall application running on any of the servers (yes SP2's firewall has been turned off too). I have also contacted my ISP regarding their stance on FTP serves and it is enabled according to them and I see no reason to disagree considering my ability to access all my other machines from remote locations.

I will say that I have on rare occasions been able to access the SP2 ftp resources. After restarting the server machine I have been able to sometimes connect for a short time and even pull down or upload small files before timing out. However once timed out I can no longer get past a login attempt (ie. I time out when trying to view folder contents, downloading, uploading, and a few other assorted commands.... changing folders does work however). Also, some of the latest versions of FTP clients (SmartFTP in particular) are touting SP2 enabled labeling. Sure enough I can consistently access the ftp resources using SmartFTP (none of the others have worked so far though). However, regardless of my being able to connect and browse through the files and even download some of the files I still time out in the middle of transfers that are large enough to put me over the timeout time limit.

None of my other servers do this. I will note that I am using IIS on all my windows based machines, but the inconsistency between the SP2 and the other versions is somewhat unsettling to me. I will try the suggestion of changing the port to see if that fixes any problems. Though it disturbs me if that does end up working because my standard ports work on all my other machines.

fitz

Well, I can tell you that the FTP setup on my IIS install on my winXP WP2 machine works fine from both inside as well as outside my network.

Without getting into all the details of your configuration, I'm not sure how much other help I can be other than to say that it is possible to have a working FTP solution with WinXP_SP2

--fitz