Re: FTP Service Discontinuance Under Consideration; Input Requested

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On 4/4/2015 6:26 PM, John C Klensin wrote:


--On Saturday, April 04, 2015 14:11 -0400 Paul Wouters
<paul@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Btw, I agree. ftp is still at times problematic with active
ports and
firewall and it offers nothing that http cannot offer.

You mean like the well-known HTTP "TYPE" and "STRU" verbs?

It is likely that neither is an issue for IETF materials as long
as they stay plain text.. at least with the possible exception
of those who complain bitterly about difficulties in displaying
I-Ds and RFC that use CRLF newline conventions, but it would
probably be good to avoid sweeping generalizations like "nothing
that http cannot offer".


+1

You know, I will venture that most people who still have FTP as part of their business or whatever, are not paying attention to this noise of "getting rid of it." It would be a disservice if the IETF did something that would begin changing things unbeknowst to them.

From a business standpoint, I have quite a major enterprises/corporations, companies of all sizes who still use FTP for their mission critical operations and it will one of those things that "no one" is going to get rid of or replace with anything else. I have two product lines that include FTP components is a big part of a virtual file/data I/O framework. Legacy or not, it is pretty solid, especially for advanced FTP systems that may include "intelligent" (programmable) FTP clients.

As far the IETF "getting rid" of their own FTP server/service/access to files... well, for many years I have used my 1997 iFTP (intelligent FTP) console client to get the RFC documents. It has DOS-like Move/Copy commands and options to save the file date (it might be default). I use it all the time, on the fly, while I am reading a text doc via my console editor. When I see a reference to RFCXXXX of interest, I spawn a "GETRFC RFCxxxx.txt" job, etc. I suppose I can change it to a web-based fetch/get, but the date will be lost too, which is OK, download date is fine for chronological timing of data.

Overall, I suppose there are IETF FTP log files to show the level of activity. I am sure it would not be much but there is still activity. We are making a big decision here, pretty quickly, and I hope that it doesn't get down to a situation where there are many folks who don't hang around here much, if ever, who are still using it in some fashion, but the IETF powers doesn't think much of that and shuts it down. There are other tools, but that generally isn't the issue -- its changing something that people have been doing for a long time and don't need to change. Those making the decision are most likely not using FTP anymore. They would not feel the impact and it would be very easy to say that a "few people" still using it doesn't justify keeping it around.

Personally, I don't see why it needs to go. What is it hurting? Is their an IETF cost savings here? Shut down a PC?

My two pennies on the matter. I would like to see the FTP server kept around.

--
HLS






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