----- Original Message -----
From: "John Levine" <johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com>
To: <ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org>
Sent: Friday, April 03, 2015 7:42 PM
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.
At least with the Microsoft software that I use, FTP preserves the date
of the file so that I can see at once how old a document is; HTTP
rewrites the date to be today, losing that information.
For I-Ds, not really an issue (but for RFC, that would be a serious
impairment).
Tom Petch
R's,
John