General Router Help
The following is intended to help you use GuildFTPd with a cable or dsl router. It is not intended to provide information for all routers, but simply provide some general information to point you in the right direction.
As cable and dsl services become more available to us, more and more users are turning to this larger bandwidth service for our Internet connectivity. This becomes complex when the home user has more than one computer that they want to share this larger bandwidth connection with all of their computers. Some of these ISPs will want you to pay extra money per month to attach more than one computer to the Internet. Others will let you use a router to share your bandwidth. A cable/dsl router is what you can use to share your connection.
A router only has restrictive settings for inbound (connections from other computers - to your computer) by default. It doesn't limit the connections from your computers to the Internet by default. This means that you won't need to change the default configuration of your router (much) to allow GuildFTPd and the FTP clients to communicate with each other.
The basics to setting up a router
to work with GuildFTPd include the following.
- Make sure that you're router is not configured to be a
DHCP server, as most routers will not forward ports if the DHCP
server option is enabled.
- Make sure that you're allowing connections on all of the
necessary FTP ports that you've configured within GuildFTPd (single
ports and/or port ranges).
- Make sure that you've set up GuildFTPd with the WAN IP
address of your router and the passive port range.
- If you had your router set up and have just upgraded the
firmware, try clearing your port forwarding options and setting
them back up.
NOTE: If you set GuildFTPd's primary port to 2100 or another non-standard port, make sure that you don't duplicate that port in your passive port range. Example: If you use 2100 for your primary port, make the passive range start at 2101 or 2102.
Sometimes, it's necessary to upgrade your router's firmware. When you do upgrade your firmware, your settings may not be working even though they are showing up in the router's config. If you've got everything set up, but can't connect, you may need to reset your router. Record all of your current settings, press the reset button, unplug the router for 5 minutes, plug it back in and set it back up.
| PROS and CONS to using a ROUTER |
| PROS |
| 1. It doesn't require much setup if you just want to share your Internet connection. |
| 2. It only needs to be configured for inbound Internet connections and doesn't stop outbound connections from your network to the Internet by default.. |
| 3. It isn't susceptible to hard drive crashes or new computers, as... once configured, it doesn't usually need to be modified unless you want to do something new. |
| CONS |
| 1. Roughly twice the cost of firewall software. |
| 2. Isn't designed to share your dial-up ISP connection. |
| 3. Isn't as restrictive on it's outbound connections and may require additional setup to keep certain computers or programs from accessing the Internet. |
Don't forget to check the syslog.txt and make sure that GuildFTPd is recording a Success audit for the ListenSocket Create and ListenSocket Listen options for your FTP port. If they aren't Success, you probably have another program running that is using the same port. You'll need to reconfigure GuildFTPd or the other program to prevent the conflict.