Passive connections mean the client does all of the initiation of the connection. Sometimes passive connections are required if you are behind a firewall. Non-passive connections are the initial connection is made by the client for login and the data channel (udp) connection is initiated by the server back to the client.
I believe wget normally uses non-passive FTP and according to the wget man page it says to get passive FTP you just add the "--passive-ftp" parameter.
The man page for "ncftpget" says use "-F" to force passive connections. "passive" is the default but if passive times out it normally falls back to normal mode.
If you are using ncftp interactively you can:
ncftp> set passive on
But are you sure this is your problem? Could it be that you have set up your firewall to not allow FTP traffic and you have your web browser configured to use your proxy server for FTP as well as HTTP traffic? I don't have any problems connecting directly through my ipchains firewall for FTP. You can also set "wget" to go through your proxy either by using command line parameters or configuring it in your .wgetrc file (make a copy of /etc/wgetrc and put it in your home directory as .wgetrc and modify).
[ September 30, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]
