200 PORT command successful. Consider using PASV. 425 Failed to establish connection

Question

I have setup FTP server in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Now when when I try to connect to FTP server from Windows 7 through command-line ftp.exe, I get successfully connected but I cannot get the list of directory. I get error

200 PORT command successful. Consider using PASV. 425 Failed to establish connection.  

Answer 1

Try using the passive command before using ls.

From FTP client, to check if the FTP server supports passive mode, after login, type quote PASV.

Following are connection examples to a vsftpd server with passive mode on and off

vsftpd with pasv_enable=NO:

# ftp localhost Connected to localhost.localdomain. 220 (vsFTPd 2.3.5) Name (localhost:john): anonymous 331 Please specify the password. Password: 230 Login successful. Remote system type is UNIX. Using binary mode to transfer files. ftp> quote PASV 550 Permission denied. ftp>  

vsftpd with pasv_enable=YES:

# ftp localhost Connected to localhost.localdomain. 220 (vsFTPd 2.3.5) Name (localhost:john): anonymous 331 Please specify the password. Password: 230 Login successful. Remote system type is UNIX. Using binary mode to transfer files. ftp> quote PASV 227 Entering Passive Mode (127,0,0,1,173,104). ftp>  

Answer 2

You are using the FTP in an active mode.

Setting up the FTP in the active mode can be cumbersome nowadays due to firewalls and NATs.

It's likely because of your local firewall or NAT that the server was not able to connect back to your client to establish data transfer connection.

Or your client is not aware of its external IP address and provides an internal address instead to the server (in PORT command), which the server is obviously not able to use. But it should not be the case, as vsftpd by default rejects data transfer address not identical to source address of FTP control connection (the port_promiscuous directive).

See my article Network Configuration for Active Mode.

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If possible, you should use a passive mode as it typically requires no additional setup on a client-side. That's also what the server suggested you by "Consider using PASV". The PASV is an FTP command used to enter the passive mode.

Unfortunately Windows FTP command-line client (the ftp.exe) does not support passive mode at all. It makes it pretty useless nowadays.

Use any other 3rd party Windows FTP command-line client instead. Most other support the passive mode.

For example WinSCP FTP client defaults to the passive mode and there's a guide available for converting Windows FTP script to WinSCP script.

(I'm the author of WinSCP)