FTP connection to dedicated server - 'illegal port command'

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Hi all,

We recently moved our Wordpress-based website from a GoDaddy shared hosting to a dedicated server. Unfortunately, the server is managed by someone who knows little about this kind of stuff — and I'm in charge of the basic html programming, so we're in the dark about lots of things.

One issue that keeps popping up whenever I'm working on our Wordpress install through FTP (through Coda, a webmaster's software for Mac OS X) is that my connection keeps timing out. After I connect, I can open a few directories, maybe a php file or two, but at some point Coda will return an error: "Failed to establish connection; Error -142: Illegal PORT command".

When this happens, the only thing I can do is disconnect, then reconnect -- and navigate all the way to the directory I wanted to access in the first place... Very time-consuming, of course.

A similar error often happens when I want to save whatever file I've been modifying in Coda (php, css, etc.): the transfer doesn't work immediately, and I get: "Failed to establish connection; Error -160: could not start data transfer." When this happens, I simply have to try saving a couple times more, and it generally succeeds after a while.

As you can imagine, these errors make for extremely time-consuming and painful webmastering. They never appeared when our website was still hosted by GoDaddy.

Any insights on how to get rid of these problems?

Cheers,
Dorian