Re: Call for Community Feedback: Retiring IETF FTP Service

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 11/26/20 6:23 AM, Roman Danyliw wrote:

>   What isn't working for you?  Have you reported it so it can be improved?
>
> If you are specifically referencing the timeout first mentioned inhttps://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/uaCQP0VPcLWzDe7hRkLiFAx4MLU/  (FTP timeout after 20 seconds), I consulted with the Tools team who tells me this configuration has been in place for over a decade.  In my quick check on ietf@ and their checking in issue reporting in recent years, this is the first time this issue has been raised.

I noticed many years ago that the ietf ftp server was "fussy", and 
noticed this again after testing the server in the context of this 
conversation.  I just never had time to figure out why.

But knowing that the control connection times out after 20 seconds, it's 
pretty obvious that that's going to be annoying for interactive users 
(there are lots of interruptions that take more than 20 seconds).

It should also be obvious that it's going to probably break some 
non-interactive programs.  (think about it, if a program is transferring 
files one-at-a-time, and any file takes longer than 20 seconds to 
transfer, the program is going to have to either explicitly recover from 
the closing of the control connection, or simply fail).

What I saw the other day when trying to do "grep 'judgment' 
/rfc/rfc*.txt" was a lot of "no such file or directory" errors that 
should not have happened because the files were actually there.   I 
don't know if this was because of the control connection timeout, but 
it's certainly plausible.

Keith