FreeBSD telnetd and Microsoft Internet Explorer

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2005-12-01 09:51, Stevan Tiefert <stevan.tiefert at freenet.de> wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 1. Dezember 2005 06:37 schrieb Peter Clutton:
> 8<--------------------
> ... funny things...
> 8<--------------------
>
> Thanks for your off-topic message... You helped very well to solve a
> problem. :-(

> Now everybody knows where the problem is, or not? There are many
> ftp-sites where IE can access them without problems. But not ftpd from
> FreeBSD 5.4 in this special case...

In a way, you could say that it's the FTP server's fault, but
only if you have very good reasons to support that IE's ftp
client mode is perfectly fine (which it isn't, but this is my
personal opinion, of course).

> Question again, why?

Because the parsing of FTP server's output for "dir" commands,
that show the listing of files in a directory, is implemented
entirely on the client side, and in this case it's horribly
broken.

> Is that a special problem oft ftpd?

No.  I've wasted many hours trying to access FTP sites that don't
run FreeBSD too, when I was forced to use IE as my "interface".

> I think it seems to be an IE-problem, but what is happening
> between IE and ftpd causing this problem?

    1. IE's ftp-client asks for a directory listing.

    2. The ftp server provides one.

    3. IE's ftp-client side tries to parse the listing.

    4. It fails.

As you said... it's an IE problem :)