FTP from Windows to VMS - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

22 Apr 2010

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I am trying to run the ftp command on Windows (7) against an FTP server on
VMS 7.3 (the UCX version of TCP/IP). I am sure this has worked in the past,
but now when I try it connects successfully but VMS never sends back the
login prompt. I tried running FTP on the VMS system back to itself and the
prompt came straight back.

Sniffing the packets I see a SYN from Windows, SYN-ACK from VMS and then ACK
back to VMS. 60 seconds later Windows resets the connection.

Are you sure the windows firewall is not fouling things up? Can you FTP
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 from the same windows machine to any other FTP server?

I vaguely remember a problem with the VMS TCPIP wanting to do a reverse dns
lookup of the client making the connection and this holding things up for
a while if it did not complete due to lack of access to dns servers etc.
However, I don't recall it causing the connection to fail.

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	ISTR, isn't there an option for command line FTP to disable/enable 
local echo, or something to that effect? Have you tried a GUI FTP client?

I would stick with the command line FTP client. Many of the GUI FTP clients
for windows assume a unix or windows filesystem on the server and
completely fail to cope with the syntax of VMS filenames. Even the ones
that claim to understand VMS can still run into difficulties. I think part
of the problem is that the RFC describing FTP says that filenames should
be in the servers format rather than in a platform independant format and
the GUI FTP client producers tend to do what they think should work rather
than follow the RFCs to the letter.

Regards,
Peter Coghlan