Troubleshooting FTP in the command line and common errors.

• First time connection If this is your first time connecting to FTP through Command line on a system, you will be prompted with a firewall access verification as shown below Once you get this, click on “Allow Access”. You will be asked for the Admin password once you complete the step, you will be able to connect.

• Firewall blocked: If the firewall is blocking your connection, your command line will remain on the screen below when you try to run a command.

This is because you are yet to give the firewall permission that allows communication between your system and the your Hosted~FTP~ account. To fix this, you will have to go to their firewall settings and restore to default. Once you restore to default, you will have go back to the command line, disconnect, reconnect and run a command (for example “ls” or “dir”). Once you do this, a firewall pop up will come up requesting to allow access.

Once this is done, it should be fixed. To verify it is fixed, run a command like “ls” or “dir” and if it lists your files and/or folders it is fixed.

• 500 PORT/EPRT (Active Mode/Extended Active Mode) is not supported. Use PASV/EPSV instead of this then,  503 PORT or PASV must be issued first
  • Switching to passive mode: We support both active and passive mode. We recommend choosing passive mode (PASV) to minimize issues with firewalls that block FTP connections. To switch to passive connection, after connecting. Run the command “Quote PASV”
  • SFTP ERROR: 500 Control Channel not secure. Issue AUTH command first In certain cases, a user can get an error “: 500 Control Channel not secure. Issue AUTH command first”. When this error is displayed, there are a couple of things the user has to verify.
• Verify that you are using the correct username and password combination. To test this out, try to login from the web if you get the error below, that means that the user is using an incorrect username and password combination.

• Force SFTP/FTPS active: The command line only supports plain FTP, which means that if you or your admin has the force SFTP/FTPS setup in your account, the command line will respond to with an error “500 Control Channel not secure. Issue AUTH command first”

There are different levels SFTP/FTPS can be forced.

Level	Description
Account level	This is when the Admin User has forced FTP/FTPS for all users under the account.
User level	This is when there is Forced SFTP/FTPS set on a specific users account.
Shared folder level	If a user shares a folder with a contact, and the user has a forced SFTP/FTPS set on the users account, the contact will also be forced to connect through SFTP/FTPS.

Reference links:

Using the command line to connect to HostedFTP

Troubleshooting FTP in the command line and common errors.

Understanding the FTP commands