WRV 210 FTP problems

[jwesllc]

I have deployed a WRV 210 Small Business Wireless Router at a small business that I support. We have multiple SSIDs, isolation, VLANs, etc set up. It works well (except for when the SSID characters turn binary and I have to reset things) but the big problem is that we cannot establish proper FTP connections from computers inside of the network to our web server, so we can not upload website files. I have troubleshot this using various FTP clients (FileZilla, DreamWeaver) and if I bypass the router, plugging directly in to the WAN I am able to FTP just fine. But if I connect to the router, I am not able to FTP. It says it connects, sometimes for 2 seconds and sometimes it stays, but the errors range from "unable to make writable" to "unable to delete file" to "server closed connection"...I know these SEEM like permissions or FTP server errors but I can assure that they are NOT, again, I am able to FTP with no problems when I am NOT behind this router. It is the moment I get behind the router that it is not able to FTP properly. I have tried using DMZ with no success. Again, to reiterate, this is not a problem with an FTP server. This is a problem establishing a FTP connection from any client behind the router, to a known working FTP server, to update our website.

Please reply with additional firmware, fixes, or any known workarounds to this issue.

[Kevin Brennan]

Hi John,

Have you tried enableing Passive ftp in your ftp client? Is there a firewall rule allowing FTP connections to be made out?

Sometimes NAT and ACL's can affect FTP connections. Have a look at the link for some more info. http://slacksite.com/other/ftp.html

If you are still having problems, try running Wireshark and see where the problem might be.

I've never used the device (WRV 210) so I dont know where you would check to see if firewall rules were correct. At its simplest though, your clients need to be able to access TCP ports 20 and 21 on the ftp server. There may be other ports involved though.

HTH

Kevin

[jwesllc]

The WRV 210 is a glorified Linksys router, and although it has a lot of very nice features, it is not nearly as configurable as a Cisco. As far as FTP rules outgoing, I have not found anything that actually governs this. It has the option for putting "an IP address" in a "DMZ" which I would think is what would be needed, but it has no effect. Is there anyone with any experience with WRV 210 routers and FTP problems? Any Cisco/Linksys moderators with suggestions for this? New Firmware to stabilize and fix the router's quirks?

[pompeychimes]

You'll find plenty of FTP knowledge in this forum but probably not much knowledge of your particular device.

Can you do anything outbound via this Router. For example browse the web?

It does sound like the classic passive ftp problem. Have you tried using your ftp client in active mode to isolate passive mode as the problem?

Enabling debug in your FTP client and using a sniffer may help you diagnose the issue.

[jwesllc]

Well, honestly the passive mode has never worked right on the FTP server I am using. So we have always used Active. Active is the mode I have used throughout troubleshooting all of this, and the mode that will connect when plugged directly in to the WAN at this site but not when behind the Cisco Small Business WRV 210 router.

Does anyone know if there is a way on this router to actually open a port, both directions, without trying to "forward" the port to a specific internal IP? If I just want to make sure that the ports are wide open.

I still think that the problem is something about how the traffic is being passed through this router, like it is being garbled up or something.

[MARC BRYANT]

I have a similar issue. I have a customer that can't ftp from behind this firewall. They have a custom batch file that runs every hour. I can run the batch file manually a line at a time. I can execute ftp from a command prompt and connect to the remote server with their username and password. Everything works fine until you try to get the file that is needed. I would like to see what is being blocked in the firewall log but there isn't one on the device. I opened up all ports from 21 to 65535 and it works but I can't leave it like this. I know that the firewall is blocking the return ftp connection but I can't see what port the return traffic is coming back in on.

[jwesllc]

Another issue I have run in to with this while trying to troubleshoot the problem is that there is no actual "log" page on the router, only a place to set up email events (I dont want 1 million emails coming to me form this thing) or a place to set up a log server. I downloaded Linksys' own logging program and specified the IP of the "log server" as the computer I installed the Linksys log tool on, but nothing is actually coming in. The documentation is pretty poor for the logging feature, but when I am having troubles with this router I would like to know what the logs say. Anyone been able to set up logging on a syslog server for the WRV210?

Does anyone from Linksys or Cisco chime in on these forums, or is there a better way to get support on this device?