Subject: Microsoft ftp client and wu-ftpd vers wu-2.4(4)

From: "Noel, Richard" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Jan 97 12:35:00 EST

Hello,
Within the past week or so, something happened so that Microsoft
ftp clients on our internal net that use our ftp gateway to establish
ftp sessions with Internet servers have been getting:

   500 command not understood

in response to certain commands such as "pwd" and "mkdir".
The ftp gateway is running BSD/OS vers 2.0.1 and ftpd ver wu-2.4(4).

If I enter debug mode on the client, I can see that the command
actually sent *from* the client is "XPWD" or "XMKD". Running ftpd
in debug mode didn't help at all as it appears (I'm guessing here)
that if the session is passing through to a server on the Internet
(rather than to the ftp gateway server itself), another binary named
(on our server) ftp-gw is instead used. I can't figure out how to get
that process to run in debug mode, if that's at all possible; ftp-gw -?
returned "illegal option".

Initially, I thought that perhaps the X prefix was causing the problem
but executing remotehelp from the ftp client (while connected to any
one of several Internet sites, including ftp.bsdi.com) shows that the
command XPWD is valid. However, man ftpd indicates that several Xcmd
commands have been "deprecated".

I have not made any changes to either BSD/OS or ftpd on the gateway
machine in quite some time, so I'm confused as to why this started
happening. I've verified that the ftp client that comes with Win95
and WFW3.11 both have this problem while the ftp clients from several
different flavors of UNIX and the ftp client that comes with Novell LWP
do not have this problem. As well, the Microsoft ftp clients do not have
problems with any internal servers, just when trying to use the ftp
gateway to get out to the Internet.

Does anyone have any insight as to what the problem might be ?

Thanks much,
Richard
[email-masked]

P.S.  I'm not asking for and do not expect to receive any help from
        list users for the Microsoft ftp client which I don't believe,
        because it worked with the gateway until just recently, to be
        the source of the problem.