FTP difficulties 4.8R

[Rob]

At 13:32 15/02/2004 -0800, Graham North wrote:
>[snip]
>My FreeBSD box on the other hand is a different story.   It is a PII 166
>[snip]
>It does go outside and connect, sometimes I can ftp download some small
>files, most times the process stalls.   I generally need to open a new
>terminal to kill the process.

It may be nothing to do with this, but I get similar problems on my DSL 
link with the default MTU setting, 1500, and I can get decidedly better 
performance by reducing it.  Windows has some sort of dynamic adjustment, 
but I've found it's more reliable to set FreeBSD specifically.   Try:

#ifconfig <network_interface> mtu 1438

and see if that makes a difference.

There are optimum values for the mtu, depending on your link parameters, 
and various formulae, but try that first before fiddling more.