Can't FTP to Alfresco from outside network

[isabel]

Hi everyone!

I really really need your help. This may seem a dumb network question but please someone help me!

Alfresco is running in Windows XP SP2. Alfresco is behind a router and we are using a private IP for it. For public access, I just forward the port 8080 in the router to the private IP of Alfresco.

I've edited the file-servers-custom.xml to enable FTP. FTP is working when you are in the same network as where Alfresco is - private network. But when you try to FTP to it from an outside network, it won't work anymore. Do you have any idea on what to do? I would really appreciate if someone can help me.

Thanks in advance.
Isabel

[pmonks]

Alfresco listens on a number of ports in addition to port 8080 (the HTTP / WebDAV port):

• Port 21 - FTP


• Port 25 - SMTP (the new inbound email functionality added in v2.9)


• Ports 137-139 & 445 - CIFS


• etc.

For these other protocols to work, you need to be forwarding those other ports through your router in addition to the HTTP port (8080).

Please note that neither HTTP nor FTP are secure protocols - they both pass credentials (usernames / passwords) in clear text, so exposing them to a public network could be a serious security problem.

[isabel]

For anyone out there who is having the same problem as mine.

There is a solution for this problem.

Client's side:

Choose a port above 1023 and then assign that port in your FTP client to use. After that, open that port in the client's router so that there would be no firewall issues.

Server's side:

No configuration needs to be done.

LIMITATION:

1. If the user has no router then that person can't use this setting.
2. If there are a lot of users in an outside network but in the same outside network, you need to open a lot of ports in your router.

I also found another solution if you can't use the settings above because your client doesn't have a router. Use the default FTP port and everything would work fine. Also read this documentation to know more about FTP and its type - active and passive: http://www.slacksite.com/other/ftp.html.

Cheers to everyone. 😃 And thanks for the reply. Though, I've replied after almost 2 weeks? hehe..=)