On Fri, 1 Aug 2003, Derek Goring wrote:

> I'm an avid curl user (for ftp) and I've never had a problem with it, but
> here's a curve ball the bright sparks in our IT department have pitched me.
> For reasons best known to themselves, they've configured this site such that
> it will only accept "passive" ftp. I'm not exactly sure what that means,
> but suffice it to say curl doesn't do it by default, and I can't find out
> how to switch curl so that it does. Can anyone help me, please?

Actually, curl *does* do passive ftp by default.

Passive ftp means that it uses the PASV command to set up the second
connection ftp uses for the actual data transfer (the first one being used for
control only). PASV makes the server open and listen to a second port and the
client connects to that and makes the transfer.

The opposite of passive, active, ftp is made with PORT and then the client
opens a new port and listens to it and expects the server to connect to it and
then the transfer is made.

curl uses passive as default since in today's world of extensive firewall
usage, NATs and god-knows-what, passive is just more common to work without
any fiddling from the user's part.

So, I did state this in a long and complicated manner, but the point is: your
problem is likely not the simple fact that you need passive ftp...

-- 
 Daniel Stenberg -- curl: been grokking URLs since 1998
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