My router died and I had to change it. I used the default settings to set up all my virtual machines. The IP changed from 192.168… to 10.0… All other VM’s can be accessed via telnet (FreeBSD, SCO, etc) but the SuSe VM errors out on the WAN. It works on the LAN. My router is set the same for the SuSE IP and port as it is for the others and it worked prior to the router change. Any thoughts?
Your router has to support port forwarding for ftp. It’s tricker for FTP because two ports are involved, for command and for data, and also the port number for the data is embedded in the command stream. So your router might not support it.
Both telnet and ftp (without SSL) are not recommended for WAN use because they expose passwords in cleartext. If you can, switch to ssh and sftp.
You need to determine if your FTP Server is configured for Active or PASV FTP, the former requires 2 fixed ports in the firewall, the second involves an initial “control” port but then configures a second data port selected from a range of ports…
So, you may also need to inspect the router’s capabilities. If you can’t configure Active FTP, then your router would need to support stateful packet inspection and dynamic opening secondary ports (preferable) or statically opening up every port in the secondary range as needed.
As ken_yap notes, regular FTP is not considered secure, even Base64 encryption is almost trivial to break and it’s not just the data but the authentication username/password that’s at risk. Better are almost any of the other encrypted connections, eg ssh, sftp, https.
HTH,
Tony