Debian to shutdown public File Transfer Protocol services

Friday, April 28, 2017

Debian, a free and open source (FOSS) Linux-based operating system, on Tuesday announced they are to shut down Debian's public File Transfer Protocol (FTP) in November, via their official website. The public FTPs are to be redirected to Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) from November 1.

On Debian's announcement list, Cédric Boutillier, a Debian developer, called the file transfer protocol "inefficient", saying "FTP servers have no support for caching or acceleration." Boutillier also added that FTP servers are rarely used. For over a decade, Debian installers have not supported FTP access on mirrors. This decision, however, would not affect the developer services, which would still support FTP.

FTP came into existence about 46 years ago for transferring files between two machines, without encryption. According to Boutillier, FTP "requires adding awkward kludges to firewalls and load-balancing daemons." HTTP, which came after FTP, was designed for data flow between servers and clients. Popular Linux distros like Kali Linux and Canonical's Ubuntu are based on Debian. The following websites are to be redirected to HTTP — rather than secure HTTPS — after October without changing the domain names:

http://ftp.debian.org
http://security.debian.org

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Sources

"FTP becoming Forgotten Transfer Protocol as Debian turns it off" — The Register, April 27, 2017
Cédric Boutillier. "Shutting down public FTP services" — Debian, April 25, 2017

External link

"Shutting down public FTP services" — Debian, April 25, 2017

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