Firewall & HTTP>FTP question

[Mitchell Patenaude]

On Fri, Aug 20, 1999 at 11:03:31AM -0700, Sebastian Mindling wrote:
> I'm serving http and ftp thru a router with pretty restrictive packet
> filtering enabled (basically just ports 80 and 21 allowed). From outside
> this firewall, users can access both the website and the ftp server
> independently, but if I put a link on the website pointing to our ftp
> server, the link does not work. If you put the link's URL into the
> location field of the browser manually, it works just fine.
> 
> Does anyone know what port(s) the web browser is trying to open up when
> it follows such a link? Or what else this could be?

Some more information that might be useful:

What does the browser to when you click the link?

Have you tried this with other links?

But, having asked those questions, I'm pretty sure that the answer has 
nothing to do with a firewall, but is most likely an HTML issue.  
(otherwise, why would pasting in the URL work? It doesn't sound like
a network error.) Check to see if the <a href=..> </a> tag is munged up.
Try putting the URL in double quotes, etc.

Probably a better forum is sonic.web or sonic.programmer newsgroups.

   -- Mitch