Upon trying to ftp some files up to a newly provisioned server I was experiencing some sporadic behavior. I could successfully authenticate to the ftp server, however I would get ‘Failed to retrieve directory listing’ in most clients. Some would begin the downloads and then drop connection instead of producing the above error message. So after verifying all the ftp server info appeared to be correct my next hunch was to take a look at the Windows Firewall and make sure that ftp could get through. So I went to Control Panel > Windows Firewall to take a look. I first examined the exceptions tab. As you can see it did appear that the appropriate ports had been added as exceptions so this left me a little confused.

I continued to dig around on the Advanced tab and upon selecting the Settings option for our Public Network connection I was presented with the option to enable the FTP Server service. Once I did this all ftp operations behaved as expected. I hope this saves you a couple cycles….