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
