Back about a week ago, I wrote about our FTP client's behaviour when
used with EPSV and how it broke when talking with at least one of the
servers behind download.fedora.redhat.com.  Following up to this, I
wrote

> I got a reply from Red Hat.  They say they "do not currently support
> commands from the epsv command set" and ask me to "[p]lease use
> commands from the classical passive command set only".  I sent back a
> reply pointing out that their server responds to EPSV with something
> that looks like a perfectly good EPSV response, and they may want to
> change that if they don't really support EPSV.  No response to that
> yet.

> They do acknowledge that this "is not a great response", adding "but
> it is all we have right now", so there is at least some awareness
> that the current situation is..suboptimal.

Today, I got mail from them saying that they "now have EPSV disabled"
(which seems to be the case in a brief test I just did) "and a
[no EPSV] string in our banner to indicated it is not supported"
(while that's not helpful except to humans, it should help humans who
are puzzled).  Apparently their FTP setup is a bit funky (which is
certainly understandable given the load they must sustain) and that's
why it took them almost a week to do this.  I suspect, based on some
text I quote below, that they have a load-balancer or some such between
the vsftpds and the world.

Then one of them googled and found this discussion :-) and writes

> Just as an FYI, I would not recommend changing the NetBSD ftp client
> behavior, as I believe it is doing the right thing.  And frankly,
> vsftpd is doing the right thing.  The problem lies either with what's
> supported or not supported with our network equipment, or possibly
> with our configuration of it.

(This is why I suspect load balancers or some such - it sounds as
though there's something more than just the FTP client and the vsftpd
involved.)

> When we get some time, we will take a closer look at EPSV and
> possibly see if we can support it.  But for now, having it disabled
> in our ftp server will allow clients to properly fall back to PASV.

And indeed the same FTP client that failed before works fine now.

As far as I'm concerned, Red Hat has earned themselves a nice big kudos
or two for practically everything they've done here.  Once I get the
list copy of this message sent back to me, I'll bounce it to them with
the Subject: changed to include the magic string from their ticketing
system, to thank them.

/~\ The ASCII				der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML	       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
/ \ Email!	     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B