Newbie can't log into his own wu-ftpd server from PowerBook G4 (Mac OS X 10.2.8)

Hello!

I am a newbie with Linux (Debian v3.1; Sarge installer; Kernel 2.6.8), and 
I seem to have troubles getting into my wu-ftpd v2.6.2(1) [from apt-get] 
server remotely on a LAN (not used for Internet since I am on a measly 
dial-up connection). It used to work in the past (two weeks ago or more) 
even after a few minutes of waiting. I am not sure what caused this 
problem. I tried both the standalone daemon and inetd setup for wu-ftpd, 
but they resulted the same.

Example:
$ ftp ANTian-AXP (also tried 192.168.0.220 IP address)

Connected to ANTian-AXP.

<<a long pause for a few minutes>>

421 Service is not available, remote server timed out. Connection closed.


I wonder if the long pauses are causing PowerBook G4 to time out/give up?  
In Windows XP Professional SP2, ftp connection is a couple minutes and
eventually lets me log in. Even ftp to localhost, on the Debian box
running wu-ftpd, takes too long (a few minutes) but it is fine once I am
logged in the FTP server. Maybe I misconfigured something on the Debian 
box?


In /var/log/messsages, I see (within the same second) from my PowerBook 
G4:

localhost wu-ftpd[3821]: connection from 192.168.0.28 [192.168.0.28] 
localhost wu-ftpd[3821]: lost connection to 192.178.0.28 [192.168.0.28]
localhost wu-ftpd[3821]: FTP session closed


I am not sure if this is related. I can ssh (have to wait about 25-30
seconds) from PowerBook G4's ssh -2 -C command; SecureCRT v3.4.8 was
instant) and ping to this Debian box without problems.

Any ideas on what's going on? Thank you in advance. :)