PS3 FTP fix-timeout while waiting for welcome message

[Nataur]

I'm not sure if this is the correct place for this. For all of those with FTP issues with timeouts while "waiting for welcome message", I've found a guaranteed solution.

I've always used WebManMOD to FTP into my console and suddenly it stopped working. I've used FileZilla and CyberDuck, but I prefer FileZilla. After I upgraded WebMan to 1.47.37, I was always getting the "waiting for welcome message" and then it would time out. Every single time.

Here's what I did to fix it:

Go into webman settings in the XMB, and disable FTP Service, NET Service and Remote Access to FTP/WWW". NET and Remote Access to FTP/WWW should be disabled anyways, unless you absolutely need them. Then use MultiMan or the Rogero FIFA 11 BlackBox v1.2 FTP". I stuck with BlackBox because it has never let me down.

As long as your IP addresses are correct, it WILL work. You don't need to specify a gateway or DNS on your PC, but on your PS3 you can use 192.168.1.1 as the gateway and the primary DNS if you want to. The secondary DNS is not required. This works for LAN and Wireless. You just have to specify SOMETHING on the PS3, but all that matters is the IP address and Subnet on both situations. Obviously your gateway has to be within the same Subnet as your IP address, so an IP of 192.168.1.10 and a gateway of 192.168.0.1 on your PS3 won't work, unless I'm mistaken and it actually accepts that mess.

It seems that the issue is that the integrated FTP service for WebMan MOD "sleeps" or hits a snag somewhere without closing the process or restarting it, or even giving you some kind of notification that something is wrong with it. The PS3 isn't capable, to the best of my knowledge, of running multiple instances of FTP services. It seems to default to one, and If it doesn't work, none of them will.

I've even tried disabling the FTP in Webman and restarting it, but to no avail. This option is a guaranteed fix, as long as FTP isn't blocked somewhere on your network between your PS3 and PC. You also shouldn't need to open any ports on your router or PC, or disable any firewalls. I didn't at least. I hope this helps someone!

 

[bguerville]

The gateway address is simply the local LAN address of your router, in your case it might be 192.168.1.1 but it could just as well be 192.168.0.1, 192.168.0.254 etc..
Those addresses are default addresses commonly used by commercial routers but they can be changed & custom LAN setups may use a totally different IP, not even starting with 192.168.

The first DNS should be either your router address (same as gateway) or a remote DNS server such as Google's 8.8.8.8/4.4.4.4 or Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1/2.2.2.2 etc..
The second DNS is there for backup in case the first one is unavailable.

Setting up Gateway & DNS manually is not a requirement because by default the PS3 will detect the router's IP and use it for both gateway & DNS anyway & if the PS3 cannot detect the router's IP something is wrong with your LAN setup. In your case, the PS3 would use 192.168.1.1 for both Gateway & DNS by default.

It's recommended to keep all other FTP servers turned off by default when using wMM or sMan. Irisman, multiman etc.. should not be set to auto launch their respective FTP server unless they are configured to co-exist with other FTP servers otherwise they would clash with wMM/sMan's FTP server.
You cannot use more than one ftp server on a machine (it's the same for http servers) at any given time UNLESS they use a different port.
For instance you could have wMM's FTP on port 21 & blackbox on port 2121, in theory that kind of setup should work just fine & you should not need to turn off wMM http/ftp server. The same principle applies for each & every FTP server you may have installed on your PS3, standalone or integrated into a backup manager.

Tbph I do not recall ever using the FTP protocol without experiencing glitches of some sort, timeouts, connection issues, transfer issues, commands that won't be executed until the client logs in again, even though it is already logged in, etc etc..

You would think that the last 2 decades would have taken care of ironing out these issues but at the end of the day, devs write their own FTP implementations, servers & clients, a number of implementations are only partial & some commands are unsupported, many do not respect all the FTP standard specs to the letter & overall there are many issues, more or less severe, with both the servers & the clients, no matter the platform in my experience.

 

[Nataur]

Yes sir, you are absolutely correct! I just threw together something simple in case anyone else had the same issues that I was having. The integrated FTP for WebMan has always given me issues and then it just got to the point where it wouldn't work at all, so I just permanently disabled it. With a little tweaking of the connection settings, it works quite well.

I usually have a direct connection to the PS3, and it never has internet access of any kind to it because I don't want the kids to accidentally update something, and my entire network is static anyways.

I've had pretty positive results with FTP in general but yeah, it definitely could use some attention and TLC. I've never had consistent speeds of more than 2 MBs but I usually just start a massive transfer and walk away anyways.

I had seen lots of posts of people having issues with FTP similar to my issue, but not exactly the same issue. There are lots of people out there that really have no clue what they're doing without a YouTube video and I definitely appreciate you adding to the post. Hopefully it will all help someone out there and to better understand why that issue happens!