Forum Discussion
FTP is broken
Just to conclude this thread - it may be helpful to others in the future...
Thanks for the suggestions. Unfortunately Zen.co.uk don't support sFTP, so I can't tell whether that would have worked better. I also wasn't keen to start using a VPN, so I don't know whether that would have helped either.
Smarty seems to be great if you just need general web and email traffic, but there is something about their network (perhaps just the constantly changing IP addresses) that messes up secure FTP and makes logging into cpanel accounts a non-starter.
Three always worked great with FTP and cpanel, so I have just started a new contract with Three again, and, as expected, it work great now. So regrettably I am terminating my Smarty account - it's a pity but its just unusable for me.
Thanks for the reply. I tried active and passive settings - no difference.
Changing to unencrypted/insecure FTP is definately not acceptable as all the traffic including the login password is sent in plain text.
I don't think it's to do with IP address translation.
The errors are intermittent. You may have 2 or 3 directory listings suceeding, then suddenly 1 or 2 fail with the errors mentioned above. If it was a problem with address translation I would expect it to always fail, but the fact that it succeeds maybe 50% of the time suggests something more buggy.
I initially contacted Zen (my web host company) and they said the problem "was at the TLS/SSL layer".
Looks like I'll have to contact Smarty. Really disappointed, as everthing else has gone so smoothly. If it isn't fixed I'll probably have to leave. 😞
Are you under the impression that SFTP (which I suggested) is insecure? It isn't - it transfers files over SSH.
Sorry, my misunderstanding.
I thought I'd try SFTP, so I tried to log into my web site's cpanel so that I could set up a SFTP login, only to find it displaying numerous error messages about invalid logins and "Your IP address has changed". I could do very little in cpanel before it bounced me straight back to the login screen with the error message. I checked with my web site provider and they checked their logs - it seems Smarty is changing my IP address every 1-30 minutes during the same internet session, and it is triggereing cpanel's security checks and throwing me out.
After a bit of a struggle I managed to get through to someone on smarty's chat facility who could only say that "Smarty uses dynamic IP addresses".
My (perhaps incorrect) understanding about dynamic IP addresses is that you are assigned an arbitrary IP address when you first connect to the ISP (presumably when the router is switched on) but that IP address stays with you the whole time until the connection is broken (the router is switched off).
What Smarty seems to be doing is changing the user's IP address every 1-30 minutes. Is that the way CG-NAT is supposed to work?
You mentioned that Three is the only UK mobile network which don't use CG-NAT - does that mean that cpanel is likely to reject connections from EVERY mobile network except Three?
Your understanding of dynamic IP addresses is correct. While you could argue that CG-NAT uses a dynamic IP address (in the sense that it's certainly not a static one), there are obviously more pitfalls than you'd get with a normal dynamic IP address.
Whether you would get the same problems with CPanel on other mobile networks, I'm not sure.. I guess it would depend if they change your external IP as frequently as Smarty do.
One possible solution for you is to do your web dev stuff over a VPN, so that your external IP (as seen by the FTP server and CPanel) remains the same for the duration of your session.
