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No More FTP At Debian (debian.org)
New submitter Gary Perkins writes: It looks like anonymous FTP is officially on its way out. While many public repositories have deprecated it in favor of HTTP, I was rather surprised to see Debian completely drop it on their public site. In a blog post, the team cited the FTP's lack of support for caching or acceleration, and declining usage as some of the reasons for their decision.
Or https/http, for simply fetching files.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
FTP has been obsolescent ever since NAT became widespread. HTTP passes through NAT with ease since only one TCP connection is established by the client to the server. The FTP way of using two separate connections for commands and data, and making the server connect back to the client, was always problematic. Passive mode FTP, in which the client establishes both connections, was always a lousy kludge to fix a fundamental incompatibility with NAT.
While good on paper, what you propose is a lot more complicated. SCP and SFTP are subsystems of SSH, which do not have the degree of fine-grained control and capability as most decent FTP servers do. Rate-limiting is one such example (i.e. rate-limiting only SCP/SFTP but not SSH). Network administrators love to think of the situation simply ("yay, I can remove annoyances relating to TCP port 20 and 21 for FTPs passive and active modes, now just pass TCP port 22 and my job is done!"), but those of us in systems who have to actually try to implement the fine-grained controls for this with SSH/SCP/SFTP are driven absolutely mad because even servers like OpenSSH do not provide that granularity.
In short: SCP/SFTP are no where close to drop-in replacements for FTP.
Sure, a lot of linux distros are hosted up on websites, but rarely do you find indexes like you can with FTP easily.
I'll miss the days of using somewhat questionable 'ftp search' websites that tried to scrape as much info as they could from anonymous-enabled FTP servers around the globe.
You'll be missed, good ol' FTP.
Yes, I think the real problem was just how to embed adverts into the listing output. If that problem could be solved then people would welcome FTP back with open arms.
Why UNIX?