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Blocked Port 21

liang_chen
Neighbour

I need port 21 for my freelance job which i'm doing from home. the company i have a contract with uses ftp servers with port 21. is there a way to get telus to unblock port 21 specifically or do I have to use a different isp? i'm not very tech saavy and don't know how to workaround it at all.

3 REPLIES 3

Nighthawk
Community Power User
Community Power User

Are you trying to run the server yourself or connect to an FTP server hosted by the company you work for? If the company hosts the FTP server, Telus doesn't block you from connecting to it. 

 

I'm surprised any company is using plain FTP these days. It's totally insecure. SFTP is at least a bit better and uses port 22. 


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xray
Hero

Most residential ISP services block common ftp, telnet and ssh ports incoming. You should be fine to for using those ports outbound to the companies servers. You haven't provided any details about how you tested and what the errors/symptoms are.

Foonus
Ambassador

You will need to set up your router and the FTP client to use non standard ports, Telus blocks most of the known ones.

When i had a FTP server running locally on the fibre a few years ago it was necessary to set port forwarding on a third party router (PfSense) and have it connecting through a port that Telus wasn't blocking, think it was port 8081 I used.  Had no issues with it, as a bonus you can set up a dynamic DNS service as well on the router so you don't need to keep changing the IP address when you get a new DHCP lease.

 

As Nighthawk mentioned the standard FTP isn't the most secure.  If there is only one user or a handful of them connecting to the server, it may be wise to add a Whitelist of their IP addresses on the firewall as well, blocking anyone else that isn't on that list from hitting your FTP server.

 

Note that most all residential providers do this to some extent. You mentioned looking into another ISP, beware any mobile ISP's or Starlink which use CGNAT.. this makes even the above process impossible, forcing you to pay for the business plan which is considerably more expensive.