FTP connection problems in Nautilus - seems to time out after a while

I have no trouble connecting to my FTP server by going to Places > Connect to server...

I can then browse the FTP site to my heart's content with Nautilus for a few minutes.

After a few minutes of inactivity, if I try to bring up a folder on the site, Nautilus just displays a blank page.

The only remedy is to unmount the FTP site and reconnect.

This is quite annoying - is there some timeout issue at play here? Is there some way that I can prevent this from happening?

Solution 1:

You could probably extend the timeout in your system. Open the gconf-editor using sudo gconf-editor and navigate to desktop -> gnome -> session. There you find a key idle_delay. You can change that value by double-clicking on it. Depending from how long you are typically inactive you change it. So if you usually don't have FTP activity for half an hour set it to a value larger than 30.

There is also an entry in Ubuntus bug tracker and in GNOME bug tracker. GNOME seems to work on a fix.