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Bug of the moment 2010-09-23


I wanted to upload a file from a Windows Small Business Server 2008 server to my home FTP server. Thought it would be a piece of cake.

Microsoft are a strange company. Windows 7 has given Paint a ribbon, yet Notepad remains the disaster it’s always been. I am not sure which committee at Microsoft decided that Paint was a widely-used tool worthy of a facelift and featurelift (hey, you can crop images directly in Paint now) but that Notepad wasn’t worth bothering with. The editor I am using right now is the (sadly abandoned) JujuEdit, only 500 kB in size, with “large” (2 GB) file support, on-disc file support, fully customisable syntax highlighting, and non-destructive hex/UTF-8/UTF-16 big and little endian support. Why something like this can’t ship with Windows, is beyond me. However, Microsoft considered that adding crayon fill to Paint was a more worthy use of their developers’ time.

Anyway, FTP. Command-line FTP in Server 2008 still has no concept of passive mode. My server reports back 425 Cannot open data connection : you supplied a local ip in PORT command, switch to PASV mode. (10060) which ftp.exe ignores before hanging.

Windows Explorer does FTP also, so I tried logging onto my server which, host (but not port) anonymisation notwithstanding, comes back with:

You tell me. That isn’t even an error. Half marks for at least reporting verbatim what the server transmitted, but it simply isn’t an error. The last two lines of the server log at this point are genuinely, PASV then 227 Entering Passive Mode (89,56,16,419,12,245). Explorer gets really upset over this and sulks.

I gave up and stored the file on my web host’s FTP server instead.


Posted 23rd September 2010 – Comments and questions?