I'm having difficulty accessing my FTP server from a machine on the LAN. I can access it just fine remotely over the Internet however. This makes no sense to me, so I'm looking for some help.
Background:
I have a weather camera set up at a cottage. It takes a photo every two minutes and saves it (via FTP) to the ClearOS sever there. Every six minutes, a Win10 machine at my house logs in to the cottage via FTP, retrieves the latest image, massages it a bit and uploads it to Wunderground. That works great most of the time, however the Internet connection at the cottage is via the cellular network and the public IP address changes frequently, sometimes interfering with the dynamic DNS. This means I can go a few days without an upload until the ClearOS box reboots on schedule (a workaround to the dynamic DNS problem) and uploads resume.
As I have a Win10 computer at the cottage too, I figured I'd just cut out the middle man and have the weather camera scripts all run locally. Good idea, except I can't for the life of me get the Win10 computer at the cottage to access the FTP server on the local ClearOS machine.
From my desktop at my house, the scripts run fine. I can also use FileZilla and manually log using the FQDN and see all of the camera images. I can also VPN to the cottage and use the private IP address for the ClearOS machine and get the same result.
If I RDP into the Win10 desktop at the cottage and try to access the ClearOS machine via the WinSCP script, it times out. If I use FileZilla on the remote machine, I can get to an emtpy directory on the ClearOS machine using port 2121. If I leave the port blank (as I do from home) I get a timeout error.
Like I said - it makes no sense to me that I can have full access remotely but am basically getting nothing if I try to access the FTP folder from a 'local' machine.
Any help?
Background:
I have a weather camera set up at a cottage. It takes a photo every two minutes and saves it (via FTP) to the ClearOS sever there. Every six minutes, a Win10 machine at my house logs in to the cottage via FTP, retrieves the latest image, massages it a bit and uploads it to Wunderground. That works great most of the time, however the Internet connection at the cottage is via the cellular network and the public IP address changes frequently, sometimes interfering with the dynamic DNS. This means I can go a few days without an upload until the ClearOS box reboots on schedule (a workaround to the dynamic DNS problem) and uploads resume.
As I have a Win10 computer at the cottage too, I figured I'd just cut out the middle man and have the weather camera scripts all run locally. Good idea, except I can't for the life of me get the Win10 computer at the cottage to access the FTP server on the local ClearOS machine.
From my desktop at my house, the scripts run fine. I can also use FileZilla and manually log using the FQDN and see all of the camera images. I can also VPN to the cottage and use the private IP address for the ClearOS machine and get the same result.
If I RDP into the Win10 desktop at the cottage and try to access the ClearOS machine via the WinSCP script, it times out. If I use FileZilla on the remote machine, I can get to an emtpy directory on the ClearOS machine using port 2121. If I leave the port blank (as I do from home) I get a timeout error.
Like I said - it makes no sense to me that I can have full access remotely but am basically getting nothing if I try to access the FTP folder from a 'local' machine.
Any help?
In FTP Server
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Responses (3)
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Accepted Answer
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Accepted Answer
Well, this is somewhat frustrating. It's working now. This is the first I've had to look into it since I posted, and the ClearOS box rebooted 17 hours ago, so perhaps that was required? Although I don't really think so as from my experience any changes (which in this case I didn't have to make) in ClearOS take effect promptly.
To answer your questions though, two connection routes:
From home to the cottage, I use the FQDN via a script. ftp > open > notmycottage.poweredbyclear.com
Within the system at the cottage, I'm trying to access the ClearOS box via the private LAN IP address 192.168.something.something
The LAN connection wasn't working, but is now.
I'm in Canada and at the cottage fixed cellular or satellite Internet are the only options. Neither are cheap or fast, so I'm trying to keep the bandwidth usage to as little as I can. That's partly why I don't keep a tunnel open all the time.
Ultimately this appears to be a DDNS issue that occurred from time to time. I have no idea why sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. The public IP address of the cottage changes regularly. I've seen it hold an IP for almost a month, but then other times renew after only a few days. Even the address blocks themselves seem to vary: 70.x.x.x, 161.x.x.x, 174.x.x.x. I'm not sure if the modem changing bands (700 MHz to 1900 or 2100) would cause this. Or even if I happen to be between sectors on the tower and the modem drifts from one to the other.
Whatever reason though, every so often I can't remotely access the cottage. It has no effect on anyone there, as they can still access the Internet as normal, I just can't VPN or FTP in. I recall once getting someone there to check their public IP and compared it with what the FQDN was resolving to, and it matched. A reboot of the ClearOS machine sometimes resolves this.
This is an occasional, random nuisance and I just had a few hours this week to poke at it. I think I've got the scripts for the WxCam working now, so we'll see how that runs for a while. My need to VPN in is infrequent and perhaps I'll luck out and not have to try to remote in when the system isn't working.
If I can find a pattern to the DDNS not working, then maybe that will point me to the cause.
Thanks for your assistance! -
Accepted Answer
At your cottage, are you ftp'ing to the ClearOS machine using the DDNS FQDN? If so, put an entry in the DNS server pointing your FQDN to the ClearOS LAN IP.
What is the problem with DDNS and the cellular connection? Are you using ClearOS's DDNS or something provided by the weather camera. The ClearOS one should respond pretty quickly to a WAN IP change.
If you have two ClearOS boxes, have you considered connecting them with an OpenVPN tunnel so you could keep a semi-permanent connection between them? Or setting up your cottage ClearOS as an OpenVPN server so you could VPN to it and access your weather camera that way?
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