RE: Call for Community Feedback: Retiring IETF FTP Service

Roman Danyliw <rdd@cert.org> Thu, 26 November 2020 11:37 UTC

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From: Roman Danyliw <rdd@cert.org>
To: Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon@orthanc.ca>, "ietf@ietf.org" <ietf@ietf.org>
Subject: RE: Call for Community Feedback: Retiring IETF FTP Service
Thread-Topic: Call for Community Feedback: Retiring IETF FTP Service
Thread-Index: Ada3CD1BnAYFDyoMT8WUdvX4VBiWMQIJ4c7AAOoAr4AAKdeNgAAZ2kMA
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 11:37:23 +0000
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Hi Lyndon!

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ietf <ietf-bounces@ietf.org> On Behalf Of Lyndon Nerenberg
> Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2020 1:03 PM
> To: ietf@ietf.org
> Subject: Re: Call for Community Feedback: Retiring IETF FTP Service
> 
> John just saved me a lot of typing; let me just +1 everything he said.
> 
> For the record, I am very much opposed to shutting down the FTP service.
> 
> I have a cluster of systems using FTP to mirror I-D's.  Just the .txt and index
> files.  This is trivial to perform with FTP, and I've been running the same FTP-
> based mirror script for over a decade.
> The cluster I use doesn't support rsync, and likely never will, yet without that
> it's still more than functional enough to work as a distributed desktop
> environment.  I won't declare the OS here as that will almost certainly just
> devolve into a set of ad hominem attacks against the operating environment,
> none of which are relevant to the discussion.

Understood.

> I will also note that part of the reason ftp.ietf.org sees so little traffic is likelty
> due to the highly aggressive session timeout on the server's FTP command
> channel, making it pretty much unuseable for interactive sessions. If you
> increased that timeout from 20 seconds to something reasonable, say five
> minutes, people might start using the service interactively.

This seems to reference another use cases -- interactive access.  Is that also from the same end point identified above?  If so, you've asked us not to discuss it, so ignore my ask.  However, if this is a different client, can you share more details on your client. I ask because it is my understanding that most FTP clients now auto-reconnect hiding any such issues.  Responding privately is fine too.

As to linking this configuration to low FTP usage, I'm not so sure.  As I noted in https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/l2rQFow9G-Nc1U04dLTCzsv5ka0/, this configuration has been in place for at least a decade and no user feedback has been voiced to indicate this is a problem (until now).

Regards,
Roman