This topic is a constantly returning issue on the PI forum on SDN so I hope this short article will be a nice reference for FTP connection error questions there in the future. The situation is that we get an FTP connection error in the communication channel and it seems that it should work as the user tested it from his own laptop. Why doesn't it work ? The answer is very simple - the laptop is usually not in the same network as the PI server. How can we check if the connection from XI/PI server works ? There are a few ways and I will just show 3 easiest ones:

First method - telnet from the server's command line

The first method is the easiest one - as you only have to run a telnet command from the command prompt of the PI server host (you don't need to use any FTP client). Just run the telnet command to the FTP server and remember to specify the correct port as per figure below.



If the port is opened you should be able to see a connection message which means that XI/PI server host can connect to the FTP.



 

Second method - telnet from the ABAP stack of PI

It may happen and in many cases that's the way how security is done, that you will not have access to the PI server's command line. Can you execute the telnet command in any other way ? Of course you can, from transaction SM69 (running external commands) from the ABAP stack of your PI (I'm assuming you don't have single stack PI yet). Within this transaction you can execute a telnet command by specifying it in the correct fields - as per the fiture below. 



Once you execute it, it will also display if the connection is working or not.


Third method - use the FTP test tool prepared by SAP for XI/PI


OSS note - 1085539 - mentions a tool (pretty old one) which once deployed on XI/PI server can be used to check if the FTP server connection is working. You can deploy it by deploying the ear file from the OSS note and start using it by specifying URL: http://<pihost>:<j2eeport>/ftpjdbc
Once you select "FTP connection test" you can insert your FTP connection parameters and test the connection from your XI/PI server as per figure below.

Note
Please remember that with the first two options we don't check the user/password, we only check if the host of PI has a network access to the ftp port.