[MAINTENANCE] Shutting down FTP services at netfilter.org

[MAINTENANCE] Shutting down FTP services at netfilter.org

[Pablo Neira Ayuso]

Hi,

Kernel.org already disabled FTP years ago [1]:

 "... we're thinking it's time to terminate another service that has
  important protocol and security implications -- our FTP servers."

So netfilter.org will also be shutting down FTP services by
June 12th 2020.

As an alternative, you can still reach the entire netfilter.org
software repository through HTTP at this new location:

        https://netfilter.org/pub/

Thanks.

Pablo,
on behalf of the Netfilter coreteam.

[1] https://www.kernel.org/shutting-down-ftp-services.html

Re: [MAINTENANCE] Shutting down FTP services at netfilter.org

[Harald Welte]

Hi Pablo,

On Wed, Jun 03, 2020 at 01:37:12PM +0200, Pablo Neira Ayuso wrote:
> So netfilter.org will also be shutting down FTP services by
> June 12th 2020.

I always find that somewhat sad, as with HTTP there is no real convenient
way to get directory listings in a standardized / parseable format.  But
of course I understand the rationale and I obviously respect your
decision in that matter.

> As an alternative, you can still reach the entire netfilter.org
> software repository through HTTP at this new location:
> 
>         https://netfilter.org/pub/

Maybe make http://ftp.netfilter.org/ an alias to it?

I think the important part would be some way to conveniently obtain a
full clone, e.g. by rsync.  This way both public and private mirrors
can exist in an efficient way, without having to resort to 'wget -r'
or related hacks, which then only use file size as an indication if a
file might have changed, ...

Regards,
	Harald
-- 
- Harald Welte <laforge@gnumonks.org>           http://laforge.gnumonks.org/
============================================================================
"Privacy in residential applications is a desirable marketing option."
                                                  (ETSI EN 300 175-7 Ch. A6)

Re: [MAINTENANCE] Shutting down FTP services at netfilter.org

[Jan Engelhardt]

On Wednesday 2020-06-03 19:16, Harald Welte wrote:
>
>On Wed, Jun 03, 2020 at 01:37:12PM +0200, Pablo Neira Ayuso wrote:
>> So netfilter.org will also be shutting down FTP services by
>> June 12th 2020.
>
>I always find that somewhat sad, as with HTTP there is no real convenient
>way to get directory listings in a standardized / parseable format.

There was convention, but no standard.
Which is just like what the default directory index modules of the httpd
implementations are.

>I think the important part would be some way to conveniently obtain a
>full clone, e.g. by rsync.  This way both public and private mirrors
>can exist in an efficient way, without having to resort to 'wget -r'
>or related hacks, which then only use file size as an indication if a
>file might have changed, ...

For completeness though, there is the "Last-Modified" HTTP header (similar to
what rsync bases its heuristic on). rsync is of course always preferable..

Re: [MAINTENANCE] Shutting down FTP services at netfilter.org

[Trent W. Buck]

Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@inai.de> writes:

> On Wednesday 2020-06-03 19:16, Harald Welte wrote:
>>On Wed, Jun 03, 2020 at 01:37:12PM +0200, Pablo Neira Ayuso wrote:
>>> So netfilter.org will also be shutting down FTP services
>>
>> with HTTP there is no real convenient way to get directory listings
>> in a standardized / parseable format.
>
> There was convention, but no standard.

IIUC RFC 4918 (WebDAV) can, in principle, do this.
But it's awful so nobody does. :-)

I agree that rsync:// is the easy and obvious replacement for anon FTP
(when HTTP isn't sufficient).

Re: [MAINTENANCE] Shutting down FTP services at netfilter.org

[Pablo Neira Ayuso]

Hi Harald,

On Wed, Jun 03, 2020 at 07:16:21PM +0200, Harald Welte wrote:
> Hi Pablo,
> 
> On Wed, Jun 03, 2020 at 01:37:12PM +0200, Pablo Neira Ayuso wrote:
> > So netfilter.org will also be shutting down FTP services by
> > June 12th 2020.
> 
> I always find that somewhat sad, as with HTTP there is no real convenient
> way to get directory listings in a standardized / parseable format.  But
> of course I understand the rationale and I obviously respect your
> decision in that matter.

There was a discussion regarding the existing netfilter.org
infrastructure during the last workshop. People are busy and the
infrastructure maintainance tasks end up being the last thing on the
list at the end of the day, unfortunately. Luckly, there is one more
person volunteering to help maintain the netfilter.org infrastructure
these days. Still I have to scratch my limited spare time to migrate
the infrastructure to the new datacenter.

> > As an alternative, you can still reach the entire netfilter.org
> > software repository through HTTP at this new location:
> > 
> >         https://netfilter.org/pub/
> 
> Maybe make http://ftp.netfilter.org/ an alias to it?

It's just one extra file in apache and an entry on the DNS server.
Yes, I can do that. It's probably convenient to keep this at least
working for a while.

I cannot hide, however, that I would like to simplify the existing
infrastructure to reduce the maintainance burden to adecuate it to the
existing resource availability. Including the consolidation of the
existing virtual servers in apache around one or two instances.

> I think the important part would be some way to conveniently obtain a
> full clone, e.g. by rsync.  This way both public and private mirrors
> can exist in an efficient way, without having to resort to 'wget -r'
> or related hacks, which then only use file size as an indication if a
> file might have changed, ...

Regarding rsync: I'm actually considering to propose to remove
netfilter mirrors or, alternatively, only propose to maintain a number
of them that have worked reliably along these years. So rsync would be
only available for those few people that will be maintaining mirrors.

Regards.