#354 FTP library responding WAY to slow on ftp connect timeout.

[Atle Magnus Řvrebust]

I am currently programming a tcl script for an
eggdrop(www.egghelp.org) which shall tell me if a list of
ftp's are up and running or not. For making the coding a
lot more easy for me I am using the FTP library package
and I am running TCL 8.4.4 (did also try with 8.3.4). It is
a really great library and all seems to work ok, but a
rather large problem occurs when I am trying to connect
to a server which ends up with a timeout. It takes just
way to long time for the tcl library to give me the right
response: "-1".

When I connect to this server in FlashFXP in Windows it
says;
Connecting to 123.456.789.123
Connection failed (Connection timed out)

This is what I type & get in tcl cmd line;
% ftp::Open 123.456.789.123 username password
-timeout 2 -port 12345 -mode passive
-1

As you can see, this works in theory, but it takes several
minutes before I get the "-1" response, even though I've
set the "timeout" setting.

Those minutes causes my eggdrop to totally "crash" for
some minutes and usually disconnects from the IRC
server because of this... In short; I need it to tell me
MUCH faster if the ftp is responding or not...

If this is not a bug in the tcl library, how can/shall I solve
my problem? If it is a bug, would it be possible for any of
you guys to give me a
fix? A fix is appreciated!

Thanks!

[Andreas Kupries]

Logged In: YES
user_id=75003

This can be a bug. The code we inherited is so convoluted
that it is difficult to say.

I was thinking that this could also be a DNS resolution
problem as the DNS resolver will also wait quite long for a
responses, uninteruptible, however I see that you are using
an explicit IP address.

You can activate more verbose logging, maybe this will give
us some hints. From the docs:

The output of the package is controlled by two state
variables, ::ftp::VERBOSE and ::ftp::DEBUG.
Setting ::ftp::VERBOSE to "1" forces the package to show all
responses from a remote server. The default value is "0".
Setting ::ftp::DEBUG to "1" enables debugging and forces the
package to show all return codes, states, state changes
and "real" ftp commands. The default value is "0".