On 11/26/20 2:25 AM, Carsten Bormann wrote:
On 2020-11-25, at 23:50, Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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).
Well, this is the usual problem with system administrators. They're not
the ones who actually use and need the services that they provide, and
because of that distance, they don't always properly assess the value of
those services.
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.)
Every server is different and should be evaluated separately.
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.
I personally use FTP every week or so because of features mentioned in a
recent message of mine, though only for "anonymous" downloads. The same
FTP client that lets me easily move files to or from my phone also
supports sshfs, so I use that whenever authentication is needed. But
that client would be less useful if it didn't support FTP, because I
don't have the ability nor inclination to install an ssh server
everywhere that I need to access.
Web browsers are overall very cumbersome tools for many purposes, so I'm
glad there are alternatives to them.
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).
Glad it works for you. What I don't accept is the implication that
because someone _can_ use rsync to sync the entire collection, that's
what everyone who occasionally needs access to the collection _should_
do in every circumstance.
Security considerations, NAT/firewall issues, and the wide usage of cloud storage (dropbox, google drive etc.) have made FTPbased services obsolete.
Everyone who is still using it (which appears to be a significant
fraction of active IETF participants) might not agree with you.
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.
I'm actually pretty fed up with Apple because of its constant changing
of interfaces that work. Apple's newer iPhones no longer serve the
purposes that drove my purchase of my original iPhone, and they've also
become hideously expensive and less usable and less functional at the
same time. So yeah, if you're a fan of gratuitous incompatibility, by
all means buy Apple products, but don't expect that this is the Right
Thing for others to do.
Keith
