passive ftp transfer with pkg_add

Zbigniew Szalbot zszalbot at gmail.com
Mon Jan 28 02:52:20 PST 2008


Hi there,

2008/1/28, Kris Kennaway <kris at freebsd.org>:
> Norman Maurer wrote:
> > Am Montag, den 28.01.2008, 07:19 +0100 schrieb Zbigniew Szalbot:
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> I have been trying to install KDE by using pkg_add -r kde but the
> >> download is always failing. Reading man pkg_add I see a reference to
> >> change the FTP mode to passive if the download constantly fails.
> >> However, man does not say which file should be edited to change it. I
> >> tried pkgtools.conf but I have not found anything about FTP transfer
> >> mode in there.
> >>
> >> Can you advise which file needs to be edited?
> >>
> >> Also:
> >>
> >> "Note: If you wish to use passive mode ftp in such transfers, set the
> >>      variable FTP_PASSIVE_MODE to some value in your environment."
> >>
> >> What value should be set for FTP_PASSIVE_MODE? Any value?
> >>
> >> Many thanks!
> >>
> >> Zbigniew Szalbot
> >
> > Yes just do something like that:
> >
> > # export FTP_PASSIVE_MODE=true
>
> Note that this is set automatically for the default login class
> (/etc/login.conf).  If you are not seeing it then either that file is
> not up-to-date or your user account is not in the default login class
> (see passwd(5)).

I do not have an access to this machine right now but I would think I
should have the default login class. However, I ran pkg_add -rvK kde
and I saw that while logging to the ftp server, the mode was set to
Active because at some point I saw a message that I may want to set it
to passive (I believe it was response from the FreeBSD FTP server).

I'll check when I get home. Anyway, I could not complete the download
of qt-3.3.38.tbz if I remember correctly (and I tried many times).
Interestingly enough, when I typed wget LINK TO FILE, I downloaded it
pretty fast. I then moved the file to /var/tmp but when I ran pkg_add
-r kde, it did not seem to notice the file has been downloaded before
and stopped again.

I am going to try to install kde from an iso CD.

Am I right in thinking that installing KDE via ports would take an
awful lot of time on a humble PIII 866 512RAM machine?

Thanks again!

Zbigniew Szalbot


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list