Support FTP Active Mode

[peter8777555]

MS FTP.exe does not support the passive mode.
Can i use FTP.exe in MS ALL Windows OS ?

[FlorianReimold]

I don't fully understand the question, sorry.

FTP Active mode is considered to be outdated, as it doesn't work with firewalls. It also prevents more than 1 simultaneous connection from the entire PC / ip address (Ok, this can be worked around with the PORT command). Back in 1985 nobody thought about that, but nowadays people simply use the FTP passive mode which doesn't have those downsides. Therefore, I consider implementing FTP Active mode to not be worth the time and effort. If it shall be true, that the windows ftp.exe doesn't support passive mode, you can simply use curl.exe, which is shipped with any modern Windows anyways. Curl is well tested with fineFTP Server and uses ftp passive mode by default.

I am curious though, why you are using ftp.exe: Did you just know know about the existence of curl, or are there specific reasons?

[peter8777555]

I got Fine FTP Server from China froum.
http://bbs.c3.wuyou.net/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=437791

Any Windows OS with FTP.exe,it is very convenient.
You do NOT need to download any other FTP client firstly.

OS: Windows 7 X64
Test : FTP.exe

Test_Sample.zip

[FlorianReimold]

OK, I see. We are dealing with legacy Windows OS here. Neither Windows 7, nor Windows XP should be used anymore, as those are out of support and are most likely insecure by now. But you are right, back then Microsoft did not ship curl.exe with Windows by default. For any modern Windows (Win10 and up), curl is present.

I changed the title of this issue to "Support FTP Active Mode". I personally currently don't have a justification to spend time on it, but let's see if there is more interest in this topic and if maybe anybody from the community is willing to make a PR for this.

[peter8777555]

Thanks for your reply.

[martinvahi]

Citations from 2 different comments a t this thread:

OS: Windows 7 X64

Neither Windows 7, nor Windows XP should be used anymore, as those are out of support and are most likely insecure by now.

The idea that old WindowsXP and alike computers should be trashed is not always a feasible solution, specially in industrial settings, where the old industrial equipment that still can do its job from "material processing" point of view can be really expensive to replace. (@peter8777555 did mention China, the Planet Earth de facto "global factory".) The issue at factories is that ALL OF THE FACTORY EQUIPMENT COST HAS TO BE WRITTEN INTO THE SALES PRICE OF THE PRODUCTS THAT THE FACTORY PRODUCES, which means that it is NOT just the question of whether the factory owners have a pile of money to buy new equipment, but rather, would the products produced with the new equipment be price wise competitive on the market. For example, if a competing factory still has its old, relatively slow, but really well automated (read: not many workers are needed on a payroll) equipment still running then the competing factory has already paid for its equipment with prior sales and "has its equipment almost free of charge" for producing its products. It is NOT a China specific matter, but the very same calculation also applies to western factories, which explains the various retro-computing "IT-support and sales" businesses in the West. Some references to those from my personal notes vimwiki:

• https://nixsys.com/
• https://legacycomputer.us/
• https://www.floppydisk.com/
• https://www.legacycomputerparts.com/catalog/
• https://www.stromasys.com/
• https://www.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html

Some CNC-machines might still use magnetic tapes:

• https://reeltoreeltech.com/shop/

For computer museums and retro-cafeterias:

• https://www.arcadecomponents.com/

For hobby-retro-computing fans:

• https://americanretro.shop/
• https://retrodreams.ca/
• https://www.corei64.com

Just as a side-note, a step forward from hobby-retro-computing is an effort to construct one's own computer although an easier path would be to use a "new-retro-computer" that has the Raspberry_Pi_Pico MCU on a PCB that has various ports soldered to it. As of 2025 such a Raspberry_Pi_Pico MCU based new-retro-computer costs about 20EUR, all assembled and ready, but to avoid advertising I intentionally omit the concrete reference to such a product. I just mention that the Raspberry_Pi_Pico MCU has roughly the same amount of RAM, if not more, than many of the Commodore64 era retro-computers have/had, but way more computing power (over 100MHz, two 32b cores versus the ~5MHz single 16b core). There are even modern new-retro-computer operating system development efforts, although the David Murray Commander X16 new-retro-computer seems to mimic the pre-operating-systems era, where a "userland application" analogue had/has full access to all of the hardware of the computer and in stead of an operating system there is some software at ROM on the motherboard of the machine that boots the machine to the point that a "userland applications" can be loaded and then the "userland application" can take over the machine and call some routines from that ROM.

At a less industrial setting there are also cases, where an old device has "drivers" only for legacy Windows. For example, some old video surveillance systems that are out of production have only old Windows support software that originally came with the system. New video surveillance system is added to the building anyway and nowadays it is not that expensive to just swap out the old recording devices so t hat the old analog cameras all around the building connect to a modern recording device, but it might not always be an option, specially for financial reasons, so using some old "trash computer" with era specific Windows is the optimal solution in those cases. Then comes the question, how to download even old era specific binaries to that old computer. The FTP and the the Web Browser. For FTP there is an old version of FileZilla that works with WindowsXP and one copy of it ("FileZilla_3.9.0.1_win32-setup.exe") might be found from a ~3GiB ZIP file at my SourceForge account (at least it existed at a local copy of the zip-file). For the Web Browser there is the

• https://github.com/win32ss/supermium

which I use also on Windows10 and Windows11, because it has all the modern plugin support and features of the Google Chrome, except that it also supports legacy Google Chrome plugins that Google does not want people to have like the Linus Tech Tips recommended adblocker

• https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

which is intentionally made unusable on modern Google Chrome by making the plugin API of modern Google Chrome such that those adblock plugins don't work that well. I admit that I have NOT figured out, why Ghostery still works. Anyway, the Linus Tech Tips video that told people about the YouTube watching software FreeTube got censored by Google/YouTube, because the FreeTube allows people to watch videos without advertisement and therefore telling people about how to watch YouTube without advertisements was violating YouTube usage agreement. For reference, in Debian Linux based distros there is a standard package collection program named "yt-dlp" that allows YouTube videos to be downloaded like

 yt-dlp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW7Mxj8KUJE

The more reasons to just host one's videos at one's own Raspberry_Pi that has automatically created SSH-tunnels to one's VPS like is the case with me on 2025_07_26. The following video is served from my home Raspberry_Pi through my VPS that has the softf1.org domain assigned to it. NOT always online, but good enough for friends and acquaintances to occasionally watch or download something:

• http://softf1.org:6400/files/blog_references/2025/blog_resources/technology/robotics/2024_12_23_YouTube_X_Unitree_Robotics_B2-W_wheeled_robot_with_legs_keywords_riding.webm

Thank You for reading my comment. I at least try to be useful here.