Question

I’m trying to FTP a file to a server where the password contains an ampersand (&) via ANT
The following ANT target:

<target name="upload_zip">
    <ftp server="myhost.net"
         userid="myusername"
         password="topsecret&amp;"
         port="21"
         remotedir="/public_html"
         passive="yes"
         binary="yes">
        <fileset dir=".">
            <include name="${updatefile}"   />
        </fileset>
    </ftp>
</target>

Fails with this message:

error during FTP transfer:  java.net.SocketException: Permission denied: recv failed  
   at java.net.SocketInputStream.socketRead0(Native Method) 
   at java.net.SocketInputStream.read(SocketInputStream.java:150)  
   at ... // really long stack trace

It looks like the authentication isn’t successful. If I don’t escape the ampersand, then my build file is not well formed. Am I escaping the ampersand correctly or doing something wrong?

Answer 1

I don’t think there’s an obvious problem with the method you are using – the entity should be translated correctly.

To diagnose automated ftp it’s probably best to try a similar (or identical!) transfer manually first. Usually that will reveal any external issues with connection credentials or permissions in the target file system.

If a manual transfer works, then the next step would be to ‘spot the difference’ between the manual transfer and the Ant-driven one.

A stack trace for an ftp problem is probably indicative of a pre-connect issue – once you have a connection, you’ll instead see an FTP error message, e.g.:

• Could not login to FTP server

That would probably indicate a problem with the login-password combination.

If the server is down you’ll get a trace with something like:

• java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused

It seems though in your case it was a problem with an intermediate proxy. For future readers, this resource may help in diagnosing passive ftp through firewall issues.

Failing all that, running Ant in verbose (-v) or diagnostic (-diagnostics) modes to see the innards of what Ant is doing may also give a clue.