[sword-devel] InstallMgr ftp difficulty

[Jonathan Marsden]

Karl Kleinpaste wrote:

> Trying to refresh from ftp.bible.org fails; it happens to hang Xiphos
> forever.  Trying a command line ftp program, I can get logged in, but
> any commands are rejected with "500 I won't open a connection to
> 10.0.2.15 (only to 71.206.198.112)", the latter of which is my Comcast
> IP.  VBox does local NAT in 10.0.2.x.

> Similar attempts to connect to ftp.crosswire.org reward me with "500
> Illegal PORT command."  Probably the same difficulty.

Perhaps you need to configure your FTP library to send the "real" IP
address in its PORT commands, or persuade the host OS NAT to translate
them.    Exactly how to do so I am not sure, but apparently at the
moment the virtualized OS is putting 10.0.2.15 in there as its own
address, and the various NATs are leaving that unchanged.

Are the nf_nat, nf_conntrack_ftp and nf_nat_ftp modules being loaded by
your host OS (assuming the host OS is Linux!)?

By way of comparison:  I run VirtualBox (to be precise, I use
virtualbox-ose 2.1.4-dfsg-1ubuntu3 ) here, and I just ran BibleTime 2.0
in a VirtualBox behind a Westell FIOS router, and it can FTP to and
referesh and then install a module from ftp.bible.org just fine.

That virtual machine has internal IP 10.0.2.15 too.  I'm running Ubuntu
Jaunty 9.04 Jaunty amd64 as the host OS on a 192.168.*.* local LAN.

My host OS network config is a little unusual, though, because I
followed instructions for an older version of VirtualBox in Intrepid,
and so it has a br0 bridge interface, /etc/network/interfaces looks like:

  auto eth0
  iface eth0 inet manual

  auto br0
  iface br0 inet dhcp
     bridge_ports eth0 vbox0 vbox1 vbox2 vbox3 vbox4 vbox5

  # The loopback network interface
  auto lo
  iface lo inet loopback

I used to have to set VirtualBox instances to use vbox0 to vbox 5
interfaces... now using virtualbox 2.1.4 that is no longer needed, but I
have not switched the host network config back to something more
standard.  I don't know if that br0 configuration is helping me out
here, or whether my router is doing better than yours in NATing the PORT
commands within the FTP stream?

Hoping this is at least a start in the direction of a solution for you!

Jonathan