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. 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. --lyndon
