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FTP Publishing - January 2009

During the past week, we have had two incidents (maybe one incident, incompletely resolved) of a well known (and extremely unwanted) error
ConnectException: Connection timed out.
commonly seen by bloggers who are trying to publish their blogs to external servers, using FTP. The problem was reported as fixed, originally, on December 26. It popped up again, on December 28, and that occurrence was reported as fixed on December 31.

From reading several threads in the forums, it appears that the problem was not fixed. Several reports are by bloggers who complain
Changed the domain settings (according to another forum thread) and removed ftp just keeping domainname.com. That fix worked but as of today the problem is back. This is starting to get really frustrating.
and
working for me on the one of two ftp blogs that was broken before. Now the other one, that was ok before, is broken.
and other, more optimistic observations
I fixed mine and post a blog about it.
and
Instead of entering your domain name, enter the IP address, then try to publish.
the latter are yet more cases where the owner switched from using "ftp.myserver.com" to using "myserver.com" (or vice versa) as a target server URL, a technique which has provided limited success. These are representative of several possible "FTP Server" changes currently being tried, with varying success. The technique of using an IP address instead of a server name, or vice versa, has been in use for some time.


(Update 2010/01/27): We have a new occurrence of this problem, this week.


Keeping an open mind, it's quite possible that the majority of the problems being reported are from folks affected by the problem as fixed 12/31, who applied their workaround before 12/31. Then Blogger fixed their problem, making the workarounds a problem. Others reporting their own personal experience with
ConnectException: Connection timed out.
may actually be experiencing a different problem. The symptom itself has been around for many months.

Unfortunately, only Blogger Support knows the details here, and only Blogger Support can sort this mess out reliably. Whatever workarounds that bloggers try may work in the short term, and will likely come back to haunt us later.

(Update 1/4): This has been declared fixed, by Blogger Support staff.
This problem has once again been fixed. I am very, very sorry for the trouble and assure you that we will work to permanently eliminate the problem.


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Comments

Kat said…
I tried the fix of switching from using "ftp.myserver.com" to using "myserver.com" as a target server URL and it worked. Wish Blogger was getting better on fixing these problems - coming up more and more!!! thanks for the help!

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