Panther server FTP "command not understood"

[Anonymous]

I have set up FTP on my Panther server (10.3.2) and all seems to work fine … except:

The first command after login always gets the error:

502 ‘EPSV’: command not understood.

The command still runs but it takes a long time (minutes) before the output is displayed. Has anyone else encountered this problem and/or know what is happening? TIA.

[Anonymous]

I’m getting the same problem, TIA. Of the 120 people who’ve viewed this post since March 2004, SOMEONE’S gotta know how to fix this. If that’s you, pleeeeeese post.

[circle6media]

I’ve been trying to solve this too. I’m running 10.3.7 on my Xserve. Turns out we need to open more than just port 20,21 for FTP to work through the firewall. I won’t go into how passive and active FTP work here, you can dig around for it if you want… Suffice to say, I pieced together a fix* from a slew of various posts.

Here’s what worked for me:

Stop FTP service
Open Terminal
cd into /Library/FTPServer/Configuration
sudo pico ftpaccess
(we need to specify which ports to allow passive ftp)
I added the line:
passive ports xx.xx.xx.xx 51000 51100
(where xx… is the ftp server’s ip address)
save the file

In Server Admin, go to Firewall Settings Advanced
Make a new rule
(thanks to Scott DeLeury from Apple OS X Server discussions. This rule worked for me. Initially, I found this rule written incorrectly on a few web pages, which caused some hair-pulling here.)

Action – Allow
Protocol – TCP
Service – Other

Source Address – Any
(or create separate rules for each allowed ftp user)

Source Port – Blank
Destination Address
(your ip address that people are accessing ftp from)

Destination Port – 51000 51100

Save the new rule and reload your Firewall.
Start FTP service

*Well, this “pretty much” works for me. I still get the ‘EPSV’ error, but the long lag is now gone and things are pretty snappy. I’ve had a couple users test FTP with different clients, including BBEdit, and a simple Terminal connection. No complaints. Good luck.

[tycho]

EPSV is the ‘extended’ version of the PASV command. It is described in
RFC2428 and allows communication over non-IPv4 protocols (such as IPv6) as well.
EPSV shouldn’t make no harm, only an extra
command-response.

[Author]

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