ftp via MS's ISA-Server

Hello everyone,

I've been looking for a good place for perl programmer and reached here finally. This is my very first post here, hope that I can get some good results :-)

Back to my question. Recently I were requested to alter my ftp program to utilize MS's ISA-server as a proxy when getting files from the Internet. I browsed through the documents and found that the "Firewall" option may help so I altered my source code as follows,

use Net::FTP;
require "getopts.pl";

$ftp = Net::FTP->new("www.abc.org",
Firewall => "15.19.70.1:8080"
) || die "Could not contact server.\n";

.
.
.

However, my program always hung at the above call after I added the "Firewall" option.

Frankly speaking I am not sure whether this "Firewall" option is applicable here for what I'm trying to achieve.

Can someone please shed me some light on this?

Thanks.

That depends what you're trying to achieve. Did the code work as expected with out the firewall option? If so, why put it in?

Using the ISA server as ftp proxy will a mandatory requirement in my firm soon. That's why I have to make the changes now.

Yes the program works fine at the moment when not going through the proxy.

So, is that "Firewall" option the right direction for my purpose?

In this instance, yes. I would suggest that you try this out on the ISA server before it becomes policy so that you can be sure that it'll work (and so that you have time to fix it if it doesn't...).

Already tried. The program didn't work that was why I posted the question here !!!

During my testing, I have a feeling that the ISA Server isn't the traditional ftp proxy that the net::ftp package expects. Any idea?

What does the ISA Server documentation say with regards to it being used as an FTP proxy?

First of all, the ISA Server doesn't allow my program logging into it. This is contradictory to my understanding of what a FTP proxy firewall supposes to do. I always thought of the typical approach below,

$ftp = Net::FTP->new($firewall) or die $@;
$ftp->login($firewall_user, $firewall_passwd) or die $ftp->message;
$ftp->login($ext_user . '@' . $ext_host, $ext_passwd) or die $ftp->message;


BTW, I found a solution to my problem. I get around it by making up a web-client (with libwww-perl) that fetch the target ftp URL such as "ftp://username:mypassword@abc.com/.../xyz.zip" into the "getstore" call. However, this solution is no good when getting multiple files a task that the MGET command can handle easily.

Do you think this behaviour of the ISA Server is normal? or this is just the Microsoft-way ?