What is the difference between active and passive mode?Īccording to the FileZilla wiki page on network configuration: Under Connection, under FTP, click on Passive mode and choose “Fall back to active mode” (this is an optional setting). Under Connection, under FTP, click on Active mode and choose “Ask your operating system for the external IP address” (the default setting). Under Connection, click on FTP and choose Active as the Transfer Mode. A bit of background reading with some explanation is farther down. FileZilla uses passive mode by default, but due to the network configuration of certain servers, active mode is required to establish a data connection.

OK, if you’re reading this, you probably just want to know how to make it work. The interesting thing, I thought, was that when the server agreed to use passive mode, it did so with a port on the internal IP address, which is unroutable from outside the network. Response: 421 Timeout (120 seconds): closing control connection.Įrror: Could not read from socket: ECONNRESET - Connection reset by peer Response: 425 Can't open data connection.Įrror: Failed to retrieve directory listing Status: Server sent passive reply with unroutable address.

Response: 230 User ftp_username logged in. Response: 230-Welcome to the Company Name FTP service. Response: 331 Password required for ftp_username. Status: Connection established, waiting for welcome message.

Here’s the complete conversation between the client and the server (names and IP addresses changed to protect the firm’s identity): FileZilla would then report “Error: Failed to retrieve directory listing”. Instead, the server would send a “425 Can’t open data connection” message. From inside the office, using the internal IP address, FileZilla connected normally and displayed the contents of the root directory after I authenticated.įrom outside the office, connecting via the hostname, FileZilla would connect normally and authenticate successfully, but it would not display the contents of the root directory.

One of those instances was yesterday, when I was trying to connect to my firm’s FTP site from an external network connection. I’ve been using the FileZilla FTP client for many years and in that time have had only a few occasions where the application didn’t perform with the default settings.

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