Sunday, October 19, 2008
Fixing FTP Problems with Blogger
There's plenty of folks out there having ftp problems with blogger. There are a lot of folks running blogs on their own domains. I was one of those people. Basically any time I tried to publish a post for my blog it would timeout.
First, a little background information. I run my own server which is connected to a Dlink DI-704P router. My first piece of advice to people in this situation is to make sure your router is getting the proper power it needs! Many times I have seen routers and DSL modems not work correctly because the DC power transformer was faulty. Sometimes the transformer will heat up a lot and that is a sign that it could be defective. If you are in doubt check your transformers with a volt meter.
The problem I was having occurred when I had to switch from a DI-604 router to the older DI-704P router. The power transformer failed on the DI-604 and so I swapped the DI-704P router in. After the DI-704P router was connected I couldn't publish any blogger posts. I use vsftpd as my FTP server so I started looking at vsftpd.conf and tried different things to get it to work.
Now I know that blogger is using passive ftp so one needs to make sure that their ftp server is set up for that. In my vsftpd.conf file there are the following lines:
pasv_min_port=1023
pasv_max_port=1500
Now as it turns out I had everything set correctly on the router itself. It had the necessary ports 1023 to 1500 open. The next line in the vsftpd.conf was the cause of all my problems:
pasv_address=192.168.0.101
This is the INTERNAL ip address of the computer on my LAN that runs the ftp server. I changed this address to my EXTERNAL IP ADDRESS and after a quick "/sbin/service vsftpd restart" everything worked perfectly. Now the strange part was that I was able to publish posts on the DI-604 with vsftpd set up with "pasv_address=192.168.0.101" before. It didn't always work but it worked some of the time. When I switched over to the DI-704P it would always have the timeout problem when posting. Now I'm pleased to say I can publish my blogger posts with no timeout problems.
First, a little background information. I run my own server which is connected to a Dlink DI-704P router. My first piece of advice to people in this situation is to make sure your router is getting the proper power it needs! Many times I have seen routers and DSL modems not work correctly because the DC power transformer was faulty. Sometimes the transformer will heat up a lot and that is a sign that it could be defective. If you are in doubt check your transformers with a volt meter.
The problem I was having occurred when I had to switch from a DI-604 router to the older DI-704P router. The power transformer failed on the DI-604 and so I swapped the DI-704P router in. After the DI-704P router was connected I couldn't publish any blogger posts. I use vsftpd as my FTP server so I started looking at vsftpd.conf and tried different things to get it to work.
Now I know that blogger is using passive ftp so one needs to make sure that their ftp server is set up for that. In my vsftpd.conf file there are the following lines:
pasv_min_port=1023
pasv_max_port=1500
Now as it turns out I had everything set correctly on the router itself. It had the necessary ports 1023 to 1500 open. The next line in the vsftpd.conf was the cause of all my problems:
pasv_address=192.168.0.101
This is the INTERNAL ip address of the computer on my LAN that runs the ftp server. I changed this address to my EXTERNAL IP ADDRESS and after a quick "/sbin/service vsftpd restart" everything worked perfectly. Now the strange part was that I was able to publish posts on the DI-604 with vsftpd set up with "pasv_address=192.168.0.101" before. It didn't always work but it worked some of the time. When I switched over to the DI-704P it would always have the timeout problem when posting. Now I'm pleased to say I can publish my blogger posts with no timeout problems.
# posted by cubex @ 7:37 AM 
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