The majority of the current FTP traffic appears to be from mirror
sites that would be better served using rsync.
the service for RFCs either. FTP is antiquated. In as much as we are
encouraging everyone to encrypt everything, most FTP clients and servers
lack that support.
Since it's anonymous retrieval of public information, I suppose a bad
guy could do traffic analysis, but if it's mostly mirrors, they'll be
fetching everything so it won't reveal much.
The main problem with turning FTP off is that stuff will mysteriously
stop working. I wonder if it'd be possible to look at the FTP logs
and see if there are people we recognize, and if so contact them and
ask how hard it would be for them to use rsync instead, to limit the
mysteries.
R's,
John