Local Network / Firewall Issues

On most support calls related to SFTP, the root cause is a corporate or network firewall on the customer or counterparty side. Firewalls commonly block SFTP, and firewall changes often introduce new issues that didn't previously exist.

Manually Whitelisted IP Addresses

If you have manually whitelisted any IP addresses, confirm that all of the appropriate IPs are whitelisted, not just some of them.

If your site uses a custom domain, you have two dedicated IPs that need to be whitelisted in your firewall. You can find your dedicated IPs on the Firewall page of your site. With a custom domain, you also need to connect to that domain rather than to [your_subdomain].files.com.

Without a custom domain, all of the IPs on this list need to be whitelisted, not just some of them. The list is long, and partial whitelisting causes failures. If whitelisting that many IP addresses is a problem, move to a custom domain. That gives you a pair of IP addresses to whitelist (see the prior paragraph).

Consider an IP Whitelist

If you have not whitelisted IP addresses, your firewall administrator may require an explicit whitelist for SFTP traffic. Submit a request to your network or firewall administrator to allow SFTP port 22 traffic to all of the IPs on this list. If your firewall team does not allow whitelisting port 22 traffic, ask for port 3022 instead and see the next section.

Try Other Ports

By default, SFTP uses port 22. Files.com also supports 3022 as an alternate port. Many firewalls allow traffic on port 3022 despite blocking it on port 22. We recommend testing this next once other firewall issues are ruled out. In many cases, using the alternate port is enough to get a corporate firewall to let the connection through.