Flare FTP publishing problems

Publishing output from Madcap Flare using the inbuilt FTP functionality seems to be a little flaky. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

When it does work it's very slow. I monitored the FTP activity on my server and noticed that for each copy task, Flare appears to be trying to create the directory in which the file lives. If the directory already exists, the FTP connection is terminated, at which point Flare has to connect again and then does a simple copy which works. But the very next task fails for the same reason. And so it goes on: connect, MKDIR attempt, fail, disconnect, connect, copy, MKDIR attempt, fail, disconnect, connect, copy, MKDIR attempt, fail, disconnect ...

The result is a painfully slow process: one file copied for every two connections.

However, if you get a connection this process does, eventually, succeed in copying over your output files. But much of the time, after a long wait, a successful connection and another long wait ... the process fails without copying anything. The error message is:

Problem(s) in background thread: The remote server returned an error: (55) File unavailable (e.g., file not found, no access). [System.Net.WebException]

The problem appears to be that the first file Flare tries to transfer is called something like publish_1BA597E8.txt (where the number changes every time). This file doesn't appear to exist, so I can't get past this hurdle. The log on the server side looks like this:

I should perhaps add that the distance between the desktop machine and the server is approximately a foot and a half, so you might think I could expect a nice, speedy, problem-free transfer. Using command-line FTP from the a Windows command console on the desktop machine I can connect and transfer files with ease.

Not good.