Re: On the costs of old systems (was Re: Call for Community Feedback: Retiring IETF FTP Service)

Rich Kulawiec <rsk@gsp.org> Wed, 02 December 2020 14:52 UTC

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Date: Wed, 02 Dec 2020 09:52:31 -0500
From: Rich Kulawiec <rsk@gsp.org>
To: ietf@ietf.org
Subject: Re: On the costs of old systems (was Re: Call for Community Feedback: Retiring IETF FTP Service)
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On Thu, Nov 26, 2020 at 03:19:24PM -0500, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> I think this FTP discussion and the above share something, which is a
> presumption that there are things that are just sitting around and that
> don't require any attention.  I think this is false, and I would like
> to suggest that just about everyone in this discussion knows that to
> be the case, but is forgetting it because the costs are externalized.
> This isn't meant to be a criticism, but just to draw to attention an
> important consideration about who decides.

This isn't my first day on the job.  I'm painfully aware of the costs
involved in running multiple (possibly overlapping) services, of
maintaining little-used/rarely-used/emergency-use infrastructure,
and so on, where costs may be measured via money, effort, complexity,
scheduling, and other metrics.  I say "painfully" because I've been
required to do it and I haven't always done it perfectly: hence, pain.

But I rather suspect that the aggregate effort expended in this very
discussion may well exceed that required to run the FTP service for
another decade or two. ;)  And if the ongoing/burst usage of the
service is relatively low -- which seems to be the case -- then surely
the computational resources required are minimal.

---rsk