Alright, glad I tested this out, because I was wrong about this being a
problem that showed up in 4.7 - it is the same in 4.6. I had PKG_PATH set
in a .profile on every machine and was using HTTP before - didn't pay
attention when I replaced it with a new FTP URL I guess, because I thought I
was using FTP before...backups proved me wrong though. Sorry about
mistaking the old path, but I guess it's good because had I not thought it
to be a regression, I probably wouldn't have looked into it.
The rest of the diagnosis should be sound though, I think.
Well, to play devil's advocate a bit, these aren't really servers except in
the X11 sense - they're administrative workstations. But one thing I'd like
to point out is that the NAT is not actually broken - it just doesn't take
RFC2428 into consideration, which is pretty reasonable since that RFC came
out in late 1998 and the NAT device we have I think came out the same year,
or perhaps the next one. That's also two years after they originally
predicted IPv6 becoming widely-used, heh...
I'd happily replace it with an OpenBSD machine, but the powers that be won't
have that (I work for an international non-profit with control issues that
compliments their lack of actual security and best practices nicely). Our
site is fine as we operate mostly-independently, but dealing with anyone up
the chain is a horrendous experience best avoided. They also spent the
money for a lifetime support option, so we *could*, for free, upgrade the
software to be much newer and surely supporting EPSV/EPRT, but we don't have
access to do that. Yet, that money wasted years ago is excuse for us to
never replace the thing unless it sustains hardware failure. I'd be
readying my bat...but our nonexistent recovery plan keeps me leery... ;)
I'll be setting up a local mirror once time/bandwidth allow for it, which
should be within the week. :)
--
Casey Allen Shobe
casey@shobe.info
