4.3 Network

• Proxy server - the proxy server on a remote host.

• Max. transfer connections - the maximum number of transfer connections that can be open at any one given point in time. This could be a necessity for two reasons:
  1. The remote server will only allow a certain number of ftp connections at any one given point in time. Sometimes a remote server might only allow a couple of ftp connections at one time. As you are already connected to their ftp server, if you want to download a file at the same time, mFTP will open another connection. Try to download another file and mFTP will open yet another connection...and so on.

     This option limits the number of connections so that mFTP will start to download files upto the maximum number of transfer connections. If you had this set to '2' and you dragged six files into the batch window, mFTP would only start to download the first two files. As soon as one (or more) were finished (or aborted), mFTP would then to start to download another.

  2. Sometimes opening more than one transfer connection can cause TCP problems on some machines, especially with poor serial ports. For instance, allow a near unlimited number of transfer connections, drag 30 files into the batch window and they will all start to download in one go...very slowly.

• Passive FTP - use outgoing connections only. If you are behind a firewall (either remote or local) and not using ip_masq, or remote hosts can't connect to you for some other reason, this feature allows you to use remote FTP servers regardless, by making mFTP use outgoing connections only for filelist and file transfers. The server that you connect to must support this feature. mFTP will fall back to normal operation in case the server does not support PASV. This feature is on by default.

• Use STAT for reading dirs - alternative way of obtaining a file list. Checked off by default, this feature (when turned on) makes mFTP use the STAT command of the FTP server to retrieve the file list over the control connection instead of a seperate data connection. This is slightly faster, as it does not need to establish another connection to the server, but it cannot be aborted once it starts reading the file list.