Hostnames Greater than 15 Characters Effectively Disables MSFTPSvc.
Wait, what?! Oh yeah. It just grinds to a halt, without any helpful error messages. This is just another thing that I want to jot down so I know to check for it the next time I run across a server with FTP issues.
AFAIK, it has to do with a NETBIOS limitation.
Active Versus Passive FTP on Windows 2003
For the first bit, please refer to Slacksite’s article for an excellent writeup on the difference between Active and Passive FTP.
Windows IIS’s FTP server is configured to use ports 1025-5000 for Passive FTP traffic by default. You can follow the steps at Microsoft’s support page to change the Passive FTP port range.
To enable Passive FTP, Windows Firewall must be configured to allow traffic from these ports. After verifying that the above port range is what you would like open to FTP traffic, each port number must be opened one by one. However, a simple script to automate this process is described here.
And here is a random link (ok, the link itself isn’t random, but the link behind the link is).
