Very Computer

Hi,

I maintain an FTP server, which serves as an archive for a number of
software demos. We're using ncftpd. Most people download from this archive
by going to a web page, and clicking a link to the particular FTP URL for a
demo.

Most of the time this works just fine. But occasionally, somebody who is
connected to the web via a proxy server will try to download something from
my archive and get the following message from their proxy server: "Couldn't
access remote site -- the user name was rejected."

Invariably, if I get these people to manually log in through a simple FTP
client, they can download. It's only when they try to let their web client
do the anonymous connection that they run into trouble. I am assuming that
for some reason the proxy server is not using the username "anonymous" when
it tries to connect to my FTP server. I have no idea why.

This problem pops up enough that I have to address the issue. Those who
experience problems (including my own remote developers) insist that they
never have difficulties with other ftp sites, just mine. So I can't just
blame it all on the proxy server configuration . . . I must be doing
_something_ different from everyone else.

Can anyone shed some light on this? I would settle for a hack workaround if
a true solution does not exist.

--Georg Buehler
Elsinore Technologies, Inc

Quote:>Hi,
>I maintain an FTP server, which serves as an archive for a number of
>software demos. We're using ncftpd. Most people download from this archive
>by going to a web page, and clicking a link to the particular FTP URL for a
>demo.
>Most of the time this works just fine. But occasionally, somebody who is
>connected to the web via a proxy server will try to download something from
>my archive and get the following message from their proxy server: "Couldn't
>access remote site -- the user name was rejected."

What is the name of the ftp server so people can try and see?

What proxy are people using when they have trouble?

Could be the proxy using "ftp" instead of "anonymous" and your

...

Quote:>Invariably, if I get these people to manually log in through a simple FTP
>client, they can download. It's only when they try to let their web client
>do the anonymous connection that they run into trouble. I am assuming that
>for some reason the proxy server is not using the username "anonymous" when
>it tries to connect to my FTP server. I have no idea why.

My thanks to those who proposed solutions to my problem. I did manage to
figure out what was going on.

Your suggests were really close to the actual cause. I was using ncftpd,
which has a configuration option that will completely skip the prompt for
password when username "anonymous" is used. The browsers kept trying to pass
both username and password when the server did not expect it. When I changed
the configuration back to prompting for a password, everything went fine.

Doh!

Thanks again for you help.

--Georg