FTP Problems

If you are having trouble publishing your site over FTP with CityDesk, here are a few troubleshooting techniques.

1. Check your Internet connection. Run your web browser and navigate to the home page of your website or your ISP.

2. Try With Passive Mode On and Off.

3. Check if you are running ZoneAlarm, Network ICE, or a similar personal firewall program. Try disabling that program temporarily to see if the problem is caused because the firewall is blocking access.

4. Check if your ISP or network requires a proxy server. CityDesk does not support FTP via proxy servers.

5. Double check your connection parameters. Your ISP or network administrator can tell you what these parameters should be.

FTP Server: The server's hostname might be the same as the URL of your site (e.g. www.mysite.com), or it might be a different name for ftping (e.g. ftp.internetprovider.com). It might also be an IP address (e.g. 192.160.2.34)

Subdirectory: This should refer to an actual path on your web server. If the initial directory you get plopped into when you ftp to your server is good enough, you can leave this blank. To go a subdirectory of the initial directory, do not use an initial slash (for example, public_html or users/username). Only use an initial slash if you are providing a full, unqualified path to the directory (for example, /home/user/me/public_html).

Port is almost always 21, unless your ISP tells you to use a different port.

6. Check with your ISP or Network Administrator to make sure you have permission to read and write files and create directories.

7. Try to use Microsoft Internet Explorer to open the FTP site:

Run Internet Explorer
In the address bar, type ftp://username:password@ftpserver/subdirectory
Try dragging files manually into and out of the Internet Explorer window.

Internally, CityDesk uses the same mechanism as Internet Explorer to transfer files. If you can't get Internet Explorer to transfer the files, CityDesk won't be able to, either.

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