Troubleshooting Ariel send and receive functionality

I'm posting the following instructions for testing the ports required by

Ariel interlibrary loan software. I get requests for this information a few

times a year, and at some point it will be easier to find on my blog than to

dig through my email archives from over 3 years ago - or perhaps the power of Google will cut me out of the loop entirely. I should note that I have no official relationship with the Ariel software, apart from setting it up once many years ago and hoping that I never have to do that again - the software has not been updated since 2005, which should raise a red (nay, crimson!) flag with any system administrator with his or her salt.

I suggest you start with the official documentation for setting up send/receive behind a firewall (updated June 2005!), and if you need more help, the following might be useful...

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We were able to get the send function for Ariel working today. Our firewall administrator opened ports 419, 421,

and 422 (TCP & UDP) and the 1024-5000 range in our university's external

firewall for the correct IP address and that, combined with my previous

action of dropping the Windows XP firewall, enabled us to successfully start

sending from Ariel 4.1.1.

Things were complicated by the firewall administrator's initial claim that the

firewall had been opened for those ports, but I was able to prove that that

was not the case by trying to telnet to the offending machine / port from my

home computer (outside the firewall) and getting shut out. Apparently there was a transposition error in the IP address that was originally opened up; these things happen.

The test command for a given port, if you're interested, is:

telnet xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx 419

(where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the IP address of your Ariel send station and 419 is the port you're testing; in the subsequent examples, I'll use 192.168.8.23).

If the port is truly open, and Receiving is enabled on your send station,

you will see something immediately like:

Trying 192.168.8.23...Connected to 192.168.8.23.Escape character is '^]'.220 welcome to ftp world

If the port is truly open, and Receiving is disabled on your send station,

you will see something immediately like:

Trying 192.168.8.23...Connected to 192.168.8.23.Escape character is '^]'.421 Connection RefusedConnection closed by foreign host.

If the port is completely closed or unreachable, however, either at your institution's firewall or on your Windows workstation's built-in firewall, you will see something like:

Trying 192.168.8.23...telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection timed out

I hope this helps you troubleshoot your problems!