Slow FTP access on Mac

[Plaz McMan]

I have my linux box (i486, RedHat 5.1) set up as an FTP server, among other things, on my little LAN. The thing is, when I try to access FTP from my Macs (all running 9.x), it takes FOREVER. However, from the Win/AMD machine, it's fine. The odd thing is, I can access the web site on the linux box (apache, of course) from any of my machines, at high speed.

I've tried downloading various anonftp and wu-ftp updates, but no luck.

Also, the problem seems to be intermitent - sometimes it goes the speed it should.

I don't have any firewall or anything, and the computers on my network are all 10 or 10/100Mbs, connected through a 10/100 switch.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Brannon

[Dolda2000]

Is it that the initial connection takes forever to be established, or is it that it is slow once the clients are connected?

[Plaz McMan]

Both. (IP of linux box is 192.168.0.13) Going from "http://192.168.0.13" to "ftp://192.168.0.13" takes as long as going from "ftp://192.168.0.13" to "ftp://192.168.0.13/pub/".

[Dolda2000]

Are you sure that the MacOS client keeps the connection open between the two requests? If it reconnects to CD, then it might still be that the connection takes long to establish.

[Plaz McMan]

Ok...

If that is the case, is there anything I could do about it?

Thanks,

Plaz

[Dolda2000]

I was thinking that it might be a name resolving problem, ie. that the FTP server has to wait for the DNS resolver to time out since it can't look up the IP address of the Macintoshes. I'm not sure what the best way to fix it would be, though.
The best way is, of course, having a Linux box acting as DHCP and DDNS server, but that might be excessively hard for you to set up if you aren't used to these things.
Another way, if your Macintoshes are set up as part of a SMB network, is to add winbind lookup to /etc/nsswitch.conf. I'm not sure how to do that, though; I want to stay as far away from SMB as possible.
The third way, if you have static IP addresses on all computers, is to add every computer to /etc/hosts. That's not a very nice way of doing it, but it's very easy, and it works.

[Plaz McMan]

Haven't tried that yet, but that makes sense - the windows machine is in the /etc/hosts file (for some reason, "smbclient (windows IP)" didn't work, but "smbclient (windows name in /etc/hosts)" did, which is why it's in /etc/hosts) and the Macs aren't.

I tried to set it (linux box) up as a DNS server, but the tutorial that I was reading seemed a little different than what was on my system - it's RH 5.1, so I guess the version of named is a little outdated. Syntax seemed a little different on the examples, and the filenames weren't the same. I try more later.

Oh, thank you! I will try to set that up.

Also, is there a way I can add something like "192.168.0.255" to the /etc/hosts file? That would make some entries redundent, would that be a problem?

[Dolda2000]

Of course you can add the broadcast address to /etc/hosts, but I don't really see why you would want that?

[Plaz McMan]

Well, sense the IP of the PC was in the /etc/hosts file, but the Macs weren't, I thought that maybe if I added the broadcast, it would encompass all of them, and work.

Newbie here, if you couldn't tell

Plaz

[Dolda2000]

That certainly won't work. Reverse lookups are done on the exact IP address, and, what is even worse, if you would do that, everything sent to the macs by name would be sent to the broadcast address.