Re: Call for Community Feedback: Retiring IETF FTP Service

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On 2020-11-25, at 23:50, Keith Moore <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> FTP is not technical debt

I’m pretty sure the consensus opinion among system administrators is that it very, very much is (if they even have heard about FTP).

Our department stopped offering FTP access in January 2008.
The situation with FTP server implementations had deteriorated, and after the crash of a (then already obsolete) storage array that carried the data nobody cared enough to have it set up again.
(The university computing center still has one; the newest files I can find there are from 2012.  Ah the kites archive mirror...
However, there also is a sea-ice archive that offers its considerable collection of geoscience data via ftp.)

I personally last used FTP for production with a photo printer service, which actually offered FTP upload as an efficient alternative to click-per-picture upload.
Of course, browsers now have great support for uploading collections of files, so that finally went away half a decade ago (probably as part of the general security ramp-up in reaction to the Snowden revelations, but I don’t have detailed notes of how I uploaded pictures there when).

For my personal use of IETF data, I simply rsync everything I need to my laptop and take it from there.  All the advantages that you note for having them in a filesystem, and zero wait.  Works offline, too.  A little over 10 gig or so, including the mail archive (part of which I also sync via imap, so I’m not always up to date on that).

Security considerations, NAT/firewall issues, and the wide usage of cloud storage (dropbox, google drive etc.) have made FTP-based services obsolete.
Of course, the protocol still exists, so consenting adults can use it.
The question was whether the IETF operationally needs to continue to consent, and it looks pretty grim for that from this vantage point.

I’m a little reminded of the brouhaha in 1998 when Steve Jobs took away the floppy drives from the iMac.  Yes, floppies had been useful.  For a while.  Being able to decide to stop using something, when its time has come, is a strength.

Grüße, Carsten