FTP listing and session issues

[Marc Chamberlin]

I am running a VSFTP server under Linux/OpenSuSE12.3 and BC 3.3.8 Pro Edition under Linux/OpenSuSE12.3 on my laptop as well. Recently, I attempted to run a comparison between a website on my server and a local copy of my website, on my laptop, while away from home. In other words over the internet, and I am observing a number of issues that I have not seen before while using BC within my local network at home. I am not really doing anything out of the ordinary, running the FTP connection using passive connections, no encryption. Am looking for comments/suggestions on how to resolve some of these issues.

I am monitoring (via an SSH shell) the log file of the VSFTP server while running Beyond Compare and the first thing I noticed is what appears to be an extraordinary number of CONNECT (login) and ABOR followed by QUIT session commands, all initiated by BC. This is often on a per file compare basis, but not always! That seems to be extraordinary high overhead, and this is NOT happening on the same file each time, but on the next file in a sequence of files to be compared. I do not detect anything going wrong with the connection, and it certainly does not seem timeout related as this happens quite quickly.

I wanted to view hidden files, and tried to do a recursive listing in order to speed up the comparison, but neither of these options work. When issued, BC refuses to display any sort of listing even though my VSFTP server reports sending the listing back to the client (BC) without a problem.

The last issue I am having, is that this is a large website I am trying to compare, and BC cannot reliably complete the comparison of the entire website. Again I do not see anything wrong on the server side, it appears that BC simply stops for no apparent reason. On a couple of occasions, I managed to capture the BC log and noted it simply was proceeding from the comparison of one file to the next and simply stopped with no apparent reason given either. There is no timeout occurring either, to restart a new comparison, instead BC simply just hangs.

Ideas anyone? Appreciate any help offered, I do not know how to provide any more info so feel free to direct me... Thanks in advance...

Marc..

[Zoë]

My first guess would be that it is timeout related and your read timeout setting somehow got corrupted or changed to something very short. Check your profile settings.

If that fails, the best thing to do would be to turn on debug logging in the Tweaks dialog (Ctrl+Shift+T), so BC will log the directory listings too, and send a full log along with a copy of the file generated using the Help->Support menu item to [email protected] so we can look into it.

[Marc Chamberlin]

Thanks Craig for your response. Since I believe there may be two separate issues, I am going to send you two separate emails, each with enough info (hopefully) for you to evaluate.

The first email will show what happened when I turned on the listing switches to show hidden files (-a) and generate a recursive listing (-R). This will be the complete BC log file response (rather long I am afraid) in a zip file to compress it, along with the generated support file showing the settings of Beyond Compare. This results in Beyond Compare not showing anything in the view of what is on my FTP server, rather it asks me if I want to create the target folder instead. Which of course I do not want to do. I will title this email "FTP Listing failure"

The second email I will send you will show what happens after BC has been running awhile, doing comparisons between my website on my FTP/HTTP server, and a snapshot I took of my website, on my laptop. This was done over the internet and I will send you two log files, one generated by my VSFTP server and the other generated by Beyond Compare. These log files do not show the entire transaction of what occurred (that would be way too long), just what was happening prior to and after the point at which BC seems to switch mode and goes from requesting a copy of each file to be compared in sequence; to logging in to the FTP server, requesting a file, and then logging out (QUIT) each time it wants a new file for comparison. This seems to be extraordinary high overhead but I do not understand what is causing it. I will not send you the support documents as the only difference between this example and the one I sent you in the previous email is that I did not turn on the -a (show hidden files) and the -R (recursive listing) flags in order to get BC to work. I will title this email "FTP example of high overhead"

[Marc Chamberlin]

BTW I checked the timeout settings in BC, for my profile the read timeout value is set at it's default of 40 seconds. At no point in my observations of the communication going on between BC and my FTP server have I seen a pause occur that long, unless we had reached a point at which something had completely failed and no further communication ever restarted automagically....

Marc...

[Aaron]

Hello,

Thanks for the emailed information. We were able to address the FTP Recursive issue, and we'll try to work with you troubleshooting the second FTP issue by email.