[CentOS-mirror] FTP is on its way out

Wed Aug 29 08:17:06 UTC 2018
Anssi Johansson <avij at centosproject.org>

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!