Hi folks,

given that I started this interesting thread :-) I'll add a few
considerations:

1\ Priority of passive port sharing ehnancement: Niklas survey shows that we
are indeed in good company here, but it's problably worth having a better
look at this anyway, there might be good technical reasons that led all the
other teams not to support this or it may turn up that it's "simply" because
it's somewhat hard to develop and test.

2\ Quick fix for 1.0.x codebase: pushing a 40x to the client  when no
passive port is available (or probably better: no passive port is available
within X seconds) it's probably something we need to do anyway.

3\ Suspect race condition: the problem description for the originally
reported http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FTPSERVER-359 (see also repro
code attached to the jira) actually hints also to something different as
well, in fact we state that a few (say 20) parallel threads issuing LISTs in
passive mode are able to "lock-up" the server forever. Questions:

3.1\ Is this interely explained by this thread discussion? (I don't think
so: the server should *always* be able to recover)

3.2\ Would this be fixed by a quick fix as per 2\? (likely, but it's sort of
like using nukes to for mowing the lawn)

In short my current position can be stated as follows: I think that
FTPSERVER-359 has a different root cause from what we discussed, the problem
 impact is not completely known at the moment but it appears to *severely*
affect the server availabily... having just one port is an easy way of
reproducing it (but not the cause of it).

What do you guys think?
Cheers,
F.


On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 8:09 PM, Sai Pullabhotla <
[email protected]> wrote:

> Hmmm, if that's the case, it should be a low priority task for sure.
>
> Regards,
> Sai Pullabhotla
>
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 2:06 PM, Niklas Gustavsson <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 7:42 PM, Sai Pullabhotla
> > <[email protected]> wrote:
> >> I think so. Overall, the idea is pretty cool, but too scary. You
> >> mentioned that most FTP servers support this feature, but I could find
> >> any servers highlighting this feature.
> >
> > I should not have said "most" since I have not investigated this
> > myself. The report mentions "some commercial FTP-servers" whatever
> > that means.
> >
> > A quick survey:
> > IIS: one client per port, recommends using a large enoug range (Sai)
> > FileZilla: one client per port,  recommends using a large enough range
> > proftpd: one client per port,  recommends using a large enough range
> > WS_FTP: seems to only support one client per port
> >
> > So, as mentioned in the issue, open source servers does seem to
> > support this. Makes me think it might not be such high priority for
> > us.
> >
> > /niklas
> >
>

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