FTP Question

Does anyone know what kind of bandwidth and FTP server used when it is transferring. I am running one at my house and a friend of mine is downloading something and my internet is running really slow but he is only download at about 100kbps. My internet connection is about 10Mbps down and 500Kbps up. So does the server rely heavily on the upload speed? Also I was sniffing the traffic with wireshark and I am getting A LOT of bad packets during the transfer, is this more likely the culprit?

 

have you opened up a ticket with your isp?

lots of isps will do bandwidth shaping giving minimal bandwidth to services that in their opinion, are of lesser importance.

remember also that the bandwidth you think you are paying for is measured from the local isp offices to your house (local loop/last mile, etc). after that, and into the internet, it's a crap shoot.

 

No I have not, I am not really upset with the speed of the transfer its the fact that my internet access is very slow, it could just be the ISP I will know for sure when the transfer is done, I guess what I was asking is would an FTP transfer cause this kind of slow down.

EDIT So it was the FTP transfer that caused the slowdown but I'm not really sure why anyone know?

 

Don't let the FTP server (or anything else, really) saturate your upstream bandwidth. This will delay your outgoing ACKs (TCP acknowledgements), causing retransmissions and thereby slowing down everything no matter how big your downstream pipe is.

 

So when someone is downloading a file from me does that use a lot of upstream? If so how would I limit that?

I am using Filezilla's FTP server.

 

If you have put up an FTP server without knowing, in detail, how FTP works and what your ISPs reaction to it might be, then YOU need to start reading up.

Seriously.

And open a trouble ticket with your ISP.

There is also a chance that running an FTP server at your house is in violation of your contract/terms of service.

 

I don't think that comcast will pay any attention as it is for personal use only. I did some googleing and could not find anything on FTP using my upload bandwidth, so does it or not?

 

Comcast will pay attention if your total bandwidth consumption exceeds 200GB in 1 month. Furthermore, if they notice you using excessively in 1 day, they will come a knocking.

Take it from someone who had Comcast and fought with them over this. They are Draconian when it comes to even trying to use their advertised speed.

 

That is strange, this server will rarely be used outside of the local network, I would just like to know when it does that the network will not come to a screeching halt.

 

Open a trouble ticket with your isp.

No one here (me included) can really speak to the policies, procedures, terms of service, and potential bandwidth shaping used by your isp. We can speak to what we've seen on our networks and what can commonly be expected. But at the end of the day YOUR isp is the only opinion that matters.

You should also read on how ftp works including the ack packets that get sent. There is NO WAY to shut off the use of ftp ack packets without killing ftp. Additionally, a cruddy return path for ack packets that has a big delay and/or a lot of dropped packets can really kill ftp transfers. There are many reasons this might happen including actions taken by your isp to discourage personal ftp servers.

The other question is; are you providing an ftp server for people outside of your house to use or is it for in-house, non-internet, on your personal lan use only?

makes a difference.

 

Uplink speed/bandwidth is what FTP uses. If you used the std 21 port it's a good possibality that someone may be trying to hack you. I had this happen to my FTP server. My server reported the failed login attempts to my SNMP server. All of the hackers were out of china. So I did a block on that ISP IP's. Then moved my port to one some where between 1024 and 65535 and not a single log.

 

The FTP is for my personal use only most of the time it will be used on the LAN only but sometimes I will use it from school though I doubt very much. Also I moved the port away from 21 to something above 10000 and I don't have any problems with hackers. Also I know how TCP works I just wasn't sure why I was getting so many bad ACKS.

 

if your home lan is 'leaking' out to the internet than you have some kind of screwey config.

 

I'm not really sure what you mean?