[clug] FTP Server Question

[Ian Bardsley]

G'Day List

I have managed to totally confuse myself with this.

I have a daughter working in South America who has a large number of 
digital photos that she wants to send back to us.  My thought was to set 
up an FTP server here and let her transfer the files via that medium a 
chunk at a time back to Oz.  This seemed simple.  I googled around and 
found about a hundred different ways to do this, picked the one that 
seemed to be explained the best and embarked on the exercise of setting 
up the server using vsftpd.

Now I'm in the situation of having a working ftp server that operates 
fine within my little home network but cannot be accessed from the web.

I have forwarded port 21 to the server IP on my router,  I have allowed 
service for port 21 via Firestarter but when a mate at another location 
tries to connect it appears that the connection is made and then dropped 
within 5 seconds.

Now, I have googled this extensively and found another hundred threads 
none of which offer a common explanation of the potential cause of this 
problem.  I see some suggestion that it is necessary to open ports 49000 
to 65500 as well as port 21  but  I see no explanation as to why  this 
would be necessary.  My ISP does not block Port 21 (or any other port 
for that matter). So I am now confused probably from too much information.

I am hoping now that the collective wisdom of the list may be able to 
shed some light on this situation and perhaps point me in the direction 
of a solution as this has yet again become a challenge.

My thanks in anticipation of your input

Regards to all

Ian Bardsley