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Joseph
Asked: 2009-07-08 13:37:31 +0800 CST

Can't connect to my FTP server, why?

  • 772

I have a windows 2008 server running with FTP 7 on IIS 7.

I have it configured to connect as it is out of the box, with a particular user (lets say john) with read/write access.

When I use my FileZilla client software, I can connect to the server as john just fine. No problems at all. However, when I try to connect using Windows Explorer or using the cmd prompt I get stone walled, saying "Login failed". My client machine is Windows Vista Ultimate.

Does anyone know what might be causing this?

windows-server-2008 ftp iis-7

5 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I just want to say that all the answers were helpful to me.

    In the end, however, the solution I came to was actually quite simple, and I should have thought of it sooner.

    I realized that I had not restarted the server after I installed FTP 7. I didn't actually think this was required, but after restarting the box and seeing windows explorer and the ftp cmd working, I came to the conclusion that it must be necessary to some extent.

    So, for anyone having the same issue that I've had, make sure to restart the box after you've installed FTP 7.

    • 16

  2. Make sure you are including a username in your requests. For example, when you connect with Windows Explorer, enter the URL as something like:

    ftp://[email protected]

    Alternately, you can usually also specify the password on the line like:

    ftp://USERNAME:[email protected]

    • 2

  3. Are you telling Explorer / ftp.exe to connect with a certain username, rather than 'Anonymous'?

    What errors show up in the IIS log?

    • 1

  4. If the other answers fail to solve your problem and there's a firewall in between you and the ftp server the firewall could be causing problems with passive mode ftp connections. Which is what explorer uses by default. You can change explorer to use active connections (also called port mode) with the following steps.

    1. Open Internet Explorer
    2. Tools->Internet Options
    3. Goto the advanced tab
    4. Under Browsing, click to clear the Enable folder view for FTP sites check box.
    5. Click to select the Use Passive FTP (for firewall and DSL modem compatibility) check box.
    • 1

  5. I had the same issue, and the answers mentioned above didn't work. Then I noticed that the default application pool didn't run. Since I only needed FTP, I only installed the FTP services in Win2008. The solution for me was to install the Webserver-components (basic webserver functionality) in the server functions. After this, I could start the default application pool (no restart required ;-) and the FTP login worked.

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