This is more for reference than anything but i kept hitting my head against the wall for the last few nights.
I kept getting the CONNECTION RESET error back from maven when trying to use FTP to deploy files to an external repo.
All the maven settings were set up correctly.
I eventually decided to try the POM file on my other dev computer and it worked. This then caused me to look through the setup of the systems, and i realised that my laptop was using JDK1.7 whereas my main computer was using JDK1.6.0r31
If you encounter the same issue trying to deploy your files through FTP (might occur on anything really) then make sure you try JDK1.6.