FTP and mode changes

[Jeff_Traigle]

Hello, everyone. It's been a few weeks of me getting moved and started in the new job. Have a question that's come up on one of the HP-UX 11.00 systems.

Apparently, a couple of days ago, a customer's perl and expect scripts, which use the HP ftp client, stopped working. According to the firewall support people, they were seeing ftp traffic alternate between active (the default for the ftp client according to the man page) and passive. Since the firewall was configured to disallow passive ftp traffic, the scripts failed. They've temporarily enabled passive ftp traffic and the scripts are working fine again.

So the puzzle is, how would the ftp client toggle itself between the two modes when the default is active? They haven't used the "passive" command within their scripts supposedly. It doesn't look like any patches have been installed on the system since March, but, since it was working until a couple of days ago, I doubt it's related to a missing patch and certainly not because of any new patch anyway.

Have any of you seen or heard of anything like this before? Any ideas (other than the obvious one that they changed their scripts and the person who submitted the call doesn't know or isn't fessing up)?

[Uday_S_Ankolekar]

Did you try
ftp> quote "pasv" ?

-USA..