FTP problems (connection drops)
Some of our customers are experiencing problems related to their FTP service. This includes error messages while connecting or dropped connections. We’re looking into it, and will post an update as soon as we know more. Sorry about the inconvenience.
Please check back here for updates.
Update 5/7/08 11am Pacific — We have narrowed down the problem to only affecting customers using the following ISPs: AT&T/Sbcglobal, Comcast and RoadRunner. We have tested the following solution with the help of one of the affected customers, so this should work for all: You will need to change your ftp-only user to sftp to go around what we suspect to be bandwidth throttling affecting only FTP connections.
Edit your ftp-only user to be sftp in the control panel under Users/Manage Users ( https://panel.dreamhost.com/index.cgi?tree=users.users& ). This should schedule a user update, and as soon as the little clock next to your username in the control panel is gone, log in with that user using the SFTP settings on your upload client, and you should be able to upload the large files. If your current client doesn’t have SFTP connection, you will need to download another one.
Please note, if you’re already using a shell user to connect through ftp, then all you need to do is change to sftp in your client, you don’t need to modify your user.
If the above doesn’t make your problems go away, then it’s most likely unrelated. Please send support a message, so we can look into it for you.
Update 5/8/08 9am Pacific — Apparently Verizon and other ISPs have been added to the list. Even if your ISP is not listed, please try to change to sftp, and if that doesn’t work, let us know with as many details as possible.
Update 5/8/08 10:50am Pacific — We’re continuing to look into this problem to make sure it’s not something on our end that’s causing the connection drops. We have just tested a few more cases were the customer switching to SFTP didn’t make a difference, but so far we couldn’t replicate the problem, but we’re still checking, examining more data.
In the meantime, continue trying to switch to SFTP to try that way. We recommend that over FTP anyway for its security. If you’re using telnet, you should be switching to ssh instead.
Here’s a link to the article in our Wiki regarding the use of SFTP…
(http://wiki.dreamhost.com/SFTP)
Update 5/09/08 8:15pm Pacific — We’re still looking into this issue, and thought it was resolved for most users, however, that doesn’t seem to be the case. At this point, all tests we’ve run on users mentioning problems come back working 100%. We’re unable to verify the problem at all, other than the support that’s coming in about it. We do have some support personal on some of the effected networks, and will be doing tests.
We apologize for the delay in getting this fixed, however, it’s not reproducible on our end, at all, so that makes it even that much more difficult to track down. We’ll keep updating, the more info we have.
Update 5/10/08 7:45pm Pacific — Ok, this still seems to be happening, however, we may have found a way around things. We’ve tested on a known problem network, and the test went through correctly. Please try FTP again, as some head way in the issue has been made. If not, hold tight, we’re still working on the problem
Update 5/15/08 11:00am Pacific — We’ve made a couple of small changes to our FTP server that seem to be resolving the connection dropping issues for some people. The changes should now be live on all shared servers and will be live on all PS servers shortly. If people could test some of their uploads and report success or failures to support, the help would be appreciated.
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May 8th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Even SFTP isn’t working for me.
May 8th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Here’s an email I got from Dreamhost today.
Sorry about the continued problems with this. We have re-opened the case,
and one of our admins is checking network dumps to find out more in cases
such as yours when SFTP doesn’t seem to be doing the trick. Please try to
upload again with FTP and SFTP so we can get some more data to examine,
and let me know which user’s data we should check out.
Thanks!
Andrea
May 8th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
I was experiencing dropped connections using WinSCP to connect via http://FTP. Switching to FileZilla I haven’t been dropped yet.
May 8th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Dreamhost could try taking a laptop that DOES work at their offices to a location in LA that uses any one of 4 or 5 ISP’s (i’ll give them one) where the timeout is shorter then a……. And then tell us that it’s not on their end.
Like we would all just start having the same issue all at the same time from all over?
May 9th, 2008 at 2:38 am
For me FTP is still broken, so why is this blog entry marked “Resolved: YES”?!
May 9th, 2008 at 2:56 am
is this being fixed. wtf, no ftp w/dh.? that’s hella fucked up.
May 9th, 2008 at 3:22 am
I was trrying to upload our class presentation of The FiOS Today Show, and it was failing consistently. I was really getting frustrated, until I checked in here and changed my user to use sftp instead of shell. WSftp_LE doesn’t allow sftp, so I downloaded WinSCP and I’ll give that a try…
May 9th, 2008 at 6:20 am
repete, you know it’s just not necessary to flood the comments, right? Yes, I’m a trifle upset I can’t use FTP at the moment too, because I use FTP to upload my weather website (which crapped out last night at 6:01 MST), but other than that I use SSH/SCP for all my transfers/managing, and most of my websites are automatically updating from SVN repositories anyway. So I (among with the “serioius webmasters” you mention) are NOT mourning the loss of an insecure protocol such as FTP, since we are ALREADY using secure protocols that DON’T rely on the FTP service… I mean, it’s not 1995 anymore, people!
Oh, and DH, this isn’t resolved. I’m gonna have to put in a ticket. The software that runs my only FTP website doesn’t make logs, so I can’t give you the log data (but I’m sure you could retrieve that on your end). However, I will go ahead and post my traceroute from the affected machine.
$ traceroute baht.dreamhost.com
Tracing route to baht.dreamhost.com [205.196.218.11]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1
May 9th, 2008 at 6:22 am
Hmmm, guess that didn’t work. Oh well. The point is, my traffic does NOT run through any of the named ISPs. This is obviously NOT resolved; in fact, it’s gotten WORSE since this entry was originally posted!
May 9th, 2008 at 6:51 am
After nearly giving up on Dreamhost, I D/L’d FileZilla, set up SFTP and was able to upload a 66.7mb file. I still find it difficult to understand that this is an ISP issue. Please let us know when, #1, you acknowledge that this is a Dreamhost issue and, #2. when the issue is resolved.
May 9th, 2008 at 8:08 am
OK, I was finally able to get the files uploaded. Well, I can only surmise that it was successful because the FiOS Today Show presentation works. When I get home, I expect to see a successful transfer using WinSCP. Now, how about fixing it for all the users that are using ftp?
May 9th, 2008 at 8:38 am
Here’s how to get SFTP to work for now at least if you don’t know…Since it isnt fixed.
Download Filezilla.
http://filezilla-project.org/download.php
Configuring FileZilla for SFTP
Important: Before configuring FileZilla 2.2.24 to run in SFTP, check with your Local Support Provider (LSP) to ensure your School, Department, or administrative unit supports SFTP. Since the instructions below are basic, you should also check with your LSP for any special instructions that may apply.
Start FileZilla
From the File menu, select Site Manager…….. The Site Manager windows displays.
Click the New Site button located in the bottom left corner of the window. A New FTP site icon appears beneath the My FTP Sites folder icon:
In place of the displayed words New FTP site, type a descriptive name for your new SFTP site profile (e.g., dreamhost SFTP).
Click in the Host field, then type the actual host name of the new SFTP site (e.g., servername.dreamhost.com).
Beneath Servertype, click the down arrow and select SFTP using SSH2.
Beneath Logontype, select the Normal radio button.
In the User field, enter your username.
Click the Save and Exit button at the bottom right of the window.
You have successfully created an SFTP site profile. When you next connect to this new SFTP site, you will be prompted to enter your password after entering your username.
May 9th, 2008 at 8:47 am
I am on the east coast, seems to be affecting Cablevision here, FTP bails out around 80% upload.
May 9th, 2008 at 8:54 am
FTP is still broken for me as well. I’m attempting to use SFTP but I will have to reconfigure a few things so I don’t know if that will solve my particular case. Even though there is the possible SFTP workaround how can this ticket be marked “Resolved” ?
FYI: The server that I’m connecting to is skoda
May 9th, 2008 at 9:26 am
2 Comments:
1) SFTP did resolve the issue ftp-ing to dreamhost.
2) I don’t believe it is a Comcast problem, we just uploaded our build26 to our partners over the regular ftp and it went fine. ~100 mb single file. Over the same comcast connection that was dropping ftps like crazy when connecting to dreamhost.
Because of #2, I think the ball is at a dreamhosts court.
May 9th, 2008 at 9:40 am
SFTP didn’t solve this problem for me.
And getting all of my business clients to use sftp for this problem is BS.
May 9th, 2008 at 10:08 am
I’m on a large corporate network and am not sure what ISP the company uses. I followed DreamHost’s instructions to set up user as sftp and now I can’t get into the FTP server at all (the “clock” was gone on the users page, so I thought things should start working then). I’m using Transmit on a Mac and it does have an sftp option, so I’m not sure what the problem is now.
May 9th, 2008 at 10:11 am
I switched over to SFTP and can’t log-in now. Anyone else having this same problem?
May 9th, 2008 at 10:21 am
I’m having the same problem of not being able to login via SFTP as well. I get this error message “Could not connect to server.
Connection refused.” I’ve submitted a trouble ticket, so I’ll see what they say.
May 9th, 2008 at 10:44 am
I suspect that the reason some folks are finding that SFTP works for them is that the errors are sporadic. If you’re transferring relatively small files, chances are decent that you can complete the transfer without running into an error. But on larger files, even a few MB, the chances that you’ll run into an error are good enough that you may have to retry several times before making it through the entire file. At least, that has been my experience so far.
May 9th, 2008 at 11:37 am
I talked to someone here at my company about the problems with SFTP. Turns out that SFTP is not going to be a solution due to our company’s firewall. If DreamHost doesn’t provide another solution than SFTP, we won’t be able to use the FTP (and possibly DreamHost) anymore. This firewall issue is going to occur in large companies and government organizations, so I can’t imagine I’m alone here.
May 9th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
SFTP worked for me but after I finished downloading a file I still got my connection reset by peer message that I was getting from regular http://FTP. At least my file came down first.
May 9th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Hello,
I cannot ftp to my web server.
May 9th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Right now and for the past 24 hours I have been able to ftp very large amount of data to 1and1 with no out of the ordinary problems, but I cannot ftp to dh.
May 9th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
I think I will link this thread to anyone who still thinks DH is a credible option for anything besides a basket weaving website, which is probably no one (anymore, including me).
No offense to basket fetishists.
May 9th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
i like baskets
May 9th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
Same FTP problems. I am on Time Warner Los Angeles. Some things I noticed when trying to find the solution.
Some ftp clients work better than others, i.e. dreamweaver drops the connections consistantly, and filezilla seemed to upload better.
I could ftp to other servers (not on dreamhost network) fine with little or no dropped connections.
When doing a traceroute, there are some nodes timing out on Time Warner’s network.
Problem started a few months ago after a weekend of ISP (Time Warner) downtime.
Websites were also timing out reguarly. I resolved that by using an outside DNS server, than relying on Time Warner’s dynamically assigned DNS.
Panel.dreamhost.com still times out on me.
It could be a problem with ISP throttling, and also poorly configured DNS on dreamhost’s part.
Converting my user to sftp seems to have worked for me. For now at least.
May 9th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
We’re getting it square in the keister with this one:
local: DC United Vs Chicago Fire_8 May 08_010.JPG remote: DC United Vs Chicago Fire_8 May 08_010.JPG
229 Entering Extended Passive Mode (|||18529|)
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for DC United Vs Chicago Fire_8 May 08_010.JPG
################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################
421 Service not available, remote server has closed connection.
SCP transfers work flawlessly.
Problem I have is that the software I wrote to upload our images uses the Apache commons-net library, which doesn’t support SFTP. So I’ve gotta go make source code changes to use SFTP (and another library).
Thanks a lot Comcast.
May 9th, 2008 at 9:36 pm
I can reproduce this a dozen times over and I have Linux and FreeBSD servers at home. I’m willing to give you shell accounts and work with you to fix this problem.
Please call me, IM, or email me and I will be happy to work with you.
May 10th, 2008 at 2:27 am
This one is a tricky one apparently, tad annoying, but what can you do? Good luck with a (quick?) fix.
May 10th, 2008 at 2:41 am
thank you for being a mensch chris.
May 10th, 2008 at 3:23 am
We’re having disconnection issues with normal FTP using a Singnet (Singapore) ISP.
May 10th, 2008 at 5:03 am
Having the same problem from London UK. Please fix asap.
May 10th, 2008 at 5:56 am
I was having the same issues just trying to move photos to one of my domains. Constant connection drops which I’ve never experienced before. Moved over to SFTP and haven’t had any issues since except with my client (beta). Left it going overnight and it sent ~500mb and was still idle connected for almost 5 hours when I woke up.
Time Warner Cable in TX.
May 10th, 2008 at 7:56 am
The Netherlands having the same problem … SFTP works though, slowly but stable. Just seeing everyone posted their country, if that might help, I’ve posted mine. Succes fixing.
May 10th, 2008 at 9:43 am
I have Comcast and still experiencing the problem. The speed will be smoking fast then bog down half way thru the upload and disconnect. Only trying to upload a 60mgb file. Glad to know this is not me, I have been beating my head against the wall here.
May 10th, 2008 at 10:07 am
Still connection drops on FTP from Germany.
May 10th, 2008 at 10:21 am
I pitty the fool that can’t fix his FTP by mothers day!!! Respect your mama punk.
May 10th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
After putting in a support ticket, I was just a little upset. I received the same canned message that others have reported here, with no indication that a human ever read it. As I just replied (it was a very long response), the same application, on the same computer, using the same ISP is still able to (flawlessly) FTP data to Wunderground, yet it is not even able to connect to DH. It didn’t crap out until about 6 hours AFTER they marked the post resolved on Thursday, and still has yet to work. The only difference (besides the server, of course) is the backbone the traffic gets passed through.
My traffic to Wunderground is passed from Qwest to Cogentco before it hits Wunderground. My traffic to DH is passed from Qwest to NTT to PNAP. Anyone else having problems (or even if you’re not), please run a traceroute to your server (tracert yourdomain.com from a windows prompt, traceroute yourdomain.com from MacOSX or *NIX) to see what backbone your traffic is passed through - if it’s not DH, I’m thinking it may be a backbone.
May 10th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Change to sftp?! WTF? No thanks. You change to decafe! What kind of response is that? Admitting to the problem is the first step to recovery. For what it’s worth the “ISP problem” also applies to Cox.
DH, please reassure us that you are working on the issue! The blanket statement on the support page makes it sound like you ain’t doin a thing (except passing the buck)! If I feel like you aren’t working on the issue, I must go.
Furthermore, the problem is marked as “medium” urgency. Not for me. I replaced human employees with ftp scripts years ago. Because of this issue, I am paying a person again. Argh!
May 10th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
I changed to sftp as suggested. Now it won’t even take my ftp log in information. Great work Dreamhost. Ugh! I’ll be switching to another webhost. I’m sick of this garbage.
May 10th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
i’m on SBC DSL at work and TW cable at home. switching to SFTP worked at home (TW cable), but not at work (SBC DSL). i doubt this is ISP specific, but i don’t know for sure.
May 10th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
oh, one more note - for those who had trouble switching to SFTP, i did too at first. i had to go into the DH panel and change my SFTP password, then it worked. weird.
also, i’m only transferring small files, still getting dropped like crazy on SBC DSL.
May 10th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
I haven’t been able to update the site for almost a week now (because of cut outs).
and can’t use SFTP .
So this is still a problem.
May 10th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
I just went to the trouble of switching to SFTP as Dream host had suggested.
I started uploading some files and half way through the upload It cut out just as it had done on regular http://ftp.
I am in Australia.
May 10th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
It’s still happening.. it’s getting a bit ridiculous now
It’s the busiest time of the week for me and I can’t provide my users with anything.
Australia…
May 11th, 2008 at 12:11 am
I need regular FTP only.
Otherwise I have to leave Dreamhost.
So, think about it Dreamhost, about 20 sites will be leaving you.
May 11th, 2008 at 12:23 am
“We recommend that over FTP anyway for its security.”
I don’t need security. I need to access files with ease like I have for the last 10 years.
My ver of Dreamweaver does not support SFTP. So you are insisting “we’re the problem”, and we need to collectively spend 1,000,000,00+ on new software or in lost productivity to support your whim to change?
Either FTP returns, or I don’t. I’m taking my numerous clients with me too. I’m not training eachg of my clients to solve a problem or find a workaround for a needless aggravation that you’ve created for us.
FTP ONLY!!!!!
May 11th, 2008 at 12:51 am
@Jeff Don’t worry, if they were not repairing it, it wouldn’t be the issue. The fact it’s an issue says they are working to get FTP running again. But yes, I also hoped it wouldn’t last this long :(. I’m counting they do their best.
May 11th, 2008 at 3:14 am
I got disconnected about every 5 minutes, so I guess it has something to do with cron job or something?
My server is daedalus, and I am from Taiwan.