Problems with FTP

[Alon Jacob]

I'm expiriencing a strange problem with one of my servers :
It runs VMS V7.1 with MULTINET and every once in a while when another server is trying do FTP the Alpha it gets stuck after entering the password. Every time the problem is gone in about 15 min.
When I got the chance to check this problem "live" I tried FTP-ing the alpha from within itself and found-out that when I FTP localhost (127.0.0.1) it workes fine, but the problen occures when I ftp the alpha by it's IP address.

Does anyone have any ideas?

[Alon Jacob]

Coulf it be a problem with the ethernet card? we're usin a very old COAX card.

[Veli Körkkö]

The usual cause would be issue with communicating DNS servers. Your Alpha tries to "backstranslate" the IP-address to a name. But of course typically system knows its own name and address so I would not expect this to happen
on $ ftp ownaddress case.

_veli

[Willem Grooters]

it may be the card, but there are a number of other possible causes. Bad lines may cause numerous retries, causing huge delay. It may be DNS but in this case I doubt it is since you can enter username and password (which requires communication as well).
Does it happen as wel if you access the server by it's IP-NAME, in stead of adddress? Have you tried to access the server by it's address from itself, or from another machine?
It may be a matter of routing. From another machine, where FTP is slow, try to trace the route and look for animalies, especially loops and low response.
Another issue I have ran into is multiple routes to a destination (eventually duplicate "default routes" to different nodes) that may cause trouble.

[Willem Grooters]

Just for a test, check how telnet behaves, if you can from a server that has this FTP connection trouble.

[Alon Jacob]

The telnet connection workes just fine when this occures.
As I mentioned - when it happens I connect to the server using telnet with no problem what-so-ever. Also after loging-in I try to FTP the server itself by its IP address and after entering the username and password it "freezes". Using the same FTP with 127.0.0.1 works OK.
I strongly suspect either the Multinet.
Any other ideas?

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

Did you check the operator log file, accounting for the ftp process and the tcpip$ftp_server.log (or whatever it is in multinet) in the user directory ?

May be the server aborted and the client kept on retransmitting until a timeout occured.

I would TCPTRACE the line and check what happened. Of course if it is not every 2 weeks.

Wim