We marked FTP as deprecated on the CreatePublicMirrors wiki page in December, and now it's time to move to the next step in getting rid of FTP. Setting up firewall rules for FTP is an unneeded headache for both mirror operators and clients, and establishing connections to FTP sites is slower than establishing connections to HTTP sites.
I have a neat script that sends notifications to mirror operators if it detects problems with mirrors. Some of you may have seen such emails. The email has also included information about nonworking FTP URLs. From now on, however, the script will silently remove any nonworking FTP URLs from the database if the FTP URL has been unreachable for 8 days (the default threshold for notifications), instead of sending a nag email to the mirror operator. If your FTP URL has disappeared from https://www.centos.org/download/mirrors/ , this is the reason.
We will eventually remove all FTP URLs from the mirror database and stop including FTP URLs in the output of mirrorlist.centos.org. The blockers here are the few mirrors that only have an FTP URL listed (no HTTP). Two of them seem to actually have their mirror available over HTTP as well, but the HTTP URL is not listed in our database. I've sent an email to them last week asking if it's OK to add their HTTP URL, and I've also sent an email to the other FTP mirrors asking if they could make their mirror available over HTTP. Once these issues been resolved (or a sufficient amount of time has passed) we can drop the FTP URLs from our database.
You are still of course free to serve the files over FTP if you wish, but there won't be any links to your FTP site from centos.org.
Thanks for your cooperation!