Dreamweaver FTP connection issues

[scottrichardson]

Hi guys,

For the last few days - I think since the urgent upgrades were made, My dreamweaver FTP connections keep timing out. My connections are fine for the first minute, but then whenever I try to upload a file via DW's FTP, it times out. I have to disconnect and reconnect to get it to work.

Worth noting during the time that I cannot connect with dreamweaver, my other dedicated FTP software connects fine.

Have you guys changed anything at your end that may affect Dreamweaver? It's happening on ALL of the domains in my reseller account. I can't imagine anything in particular affecting this. Maybe some sort of security/firewall setting since your upgrades?

Do I need to change my settings here at my end?

Thanks in advance,

Scott

[ross]

Hi scottrichardson,

The change's we made should not of had any affect on your Service.

I had a quick chat with our Sys Admin and he believes the issue might be related to the Hardware Firewall which your Service sit's behind. It may be dropping or timing out connections after a certain period of time.

I have created a task for our Network Engineer to take a look as it may be related to that.

I am not sure on what settings Dreamweaver has available, but if there is setting relating to Keep Alive it may be worth playing with that setting.

[scottrichardson]

Hi Ross, did you end up finding out if there may have been anything causing this? I'm still getting the timeout issues.

Cheers,

Scott

[ross]

Hi Scott,

Still investigating at this current time. We are able to reproduce the problem so there is definitely a time out of sorts going on with the redundant Firewall. We are just narrowing down what the cause is.

Can't make any changes to the Firewall while it's live as that could affect Customers, so we want to be sure we have isolated the exact cause before jumping in with a fix.

I'll be sure to update this forum thread once a fix is found.

[scottrichardson]

Many thanks for the heads up Good that you can reproduce the issue.

[scottrichardson]

Just an update. The issue appears to be getting worse. The connection drops and timeouts are happening more frequently, and in addition to Dreamweaver, I'm now getting connection issues with my standalone FTP software, Transmit. Random connections are now taking 10 - 15 seconds before it will transfer a 1KB CSS file. Usually it's instantaneous.

Really hoping you can find a fix soon as this is now starting to affect my workflow and work output.

Cheers,

Scott

[ross]

Hi Scott,

If you haven't already could you please submit a Ticket with our Tech Support, so at least have an official record of your issue and a direct contact point should we need to clarify with you.

[scottrichardson]

Just submitted one. Though, within minutes of doing that, I think I may have found my issue... and I'm rather embarrassed to admit it. I'll monitor it for the next day or so anyway.. however I had un-ticked 'passive mode'. So I have re-checked it. Appears to have fixed the issue in my tests from the last 10 minutes or so. LOL. Fail.

[ross]

Hi Scott,

Glad to hear your partially fixed your issue out.

We are just doing some further testing now but we believe we have narrowed down the cause of these timeouts. Unfortunately we can't test / make changes during the day as if something goes wrong, lots of Customer's services will be affected, so we are just running through some checks and double checks and confirmations before jumping in.

[ross]

Hi Scott,

Just a quick question, your Dreamweaver Software does it have any area where you can configure the FTP Timeout settings?

Normal FTP Clients such as CuteFTP and Filezilla have a setting that lets you set when your Client will time out.

Currently our Hardware Firewall terminates connections every 30 Minutes, now the issue with changing this timeout setting is it voids the point of having a hardware firewall as people can ues this timeout feature to launch attacks on our equipment opening lots and lots of connections which don't time out for how ever long we set. So the longer we set the time out setting the less secure our Hardware Firewall solution becomes.

So if you set your Software / Client to timeout before the firewall timeout, then it should reduce the issue that has been affecting you. Set it to 15 minutes or 20 minutes or something along those lines.

Please let me know how you go.