For a while now, I've ignored a 15-second (approximately) delay when connecting to an OS X Server (10.3) FTP server (xftpd). The delay was occurring after connecting, but before the server prompted for login.
After not finding any solutions in my searches online, I finally resorted to figuring it out myself. It turns out that, by default, the FTP service on OS X Server is configured to attempt to use RFC 931 to identify the user of the connecting client. However, the client is not, by default, configured to support the same functionality.
Fortunately, some digging in the man pages suggested that adding the -I command-line option to the FTP server (in the xinetd configuration) might eliminate the connection delay ... and it did! Included below is the (modified) /etc/xinetd.d/ftp file from my server (the -I option was added to the existing -a on the server_args line).
service ftp
{
disable = no
instances = 100
socket_type = stream
wait = no
user = root
server = /usr/libexec/xftpd
server_args = -aI
groups = yes
flags = REUSE
}
With this change, there's no more delay when connecting...
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050223231518462