Deprecating base system ftpd?

[Charles Sprickman]

> On Apr 5, 2021, at 3:01 PM, Patrick M. Hausen <hausen at punkt.de> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I absolutely freaked out when Apple removed the telnet and ftp clients
> from Mac OS and I needed to reinstall them via MacPorts.

Yep, and what I think many miss IRT to the stock ftpd is that it’s dumb simple and “just works”.

For web hosting stuff I generally use something like Proftpd or vsftpd, and, IMHO, that’s when you should have to expend brain power to choose something from ports - when your use-case (supporting hosting customers, virtual users, etc.) requires a non-trivial ftp implementation.

Also I can count on my left hand the number of web hosting customers I’ve run into that actually use scp for sftp or even know what that is. They’re using the same ftp client they’ve always used (ws-ftp quite often) and the last thing they want to do is learn something new.

> People who manage any larger collection of networking gear *depend*
> on these outdated but simple services. Client and server side alike.

I frequently work with people who have limited budgets, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. Ebay is chock full of high-volume sellers turning over old networking gear that is amazingly good stuff that’s just outdated. I can grab a 48 port GigE switch with 10gb/s uplink ports for under $200. The market is gigantic, and putting old stuff to use on an internal network with proper safeguards is not totally crazy. Customers can have multiple fully-loaded spares on-site for less than what a year of SmartNet coverage would cost.

My server platform of choice when I want a “support server” for this old stuff has always been FreeBSD. Stock tftpd and ftpd are wonderful, and anyone professing that those two tiny daemons are “bloat” just hasn’t used Linux.

> TFTP is not going away, neither is FTP. I'm dead serious. Remote media
> via Supermicro IPMI in 2021? SMB1. Firmware updates for my UPS? FTP.
> Scanner/printer/fax all-in-one thingy? Uploads received fax transmissions
> via FTP. PBX? Uploads usage reports via FTP. This stuff is here to stay.
> In local networks, of course.

Preach! And plenty of VoIP gear too!

There are absolutely real world uses for these simple daemons, and I trust some stock FreeBSD daemon like this more than something I might fetch from ports - both in terms of knowing it’s had some kind of auditing/maintenance by qualified people and that it’s going to have an accurate manpage, sane defaults, and remain relatively simple/minimal.

I think as everyone has moved to the cloud and devops and all that they forget about sysadmins standing up servers as simple utility boxes that support a bunch of other gear.

> But still even on "the Internet", FTP is the most used method for customers
> of static website hosting. You cannot teach these people what an SSH key is.
> Just my experience, but backed by a load of customer interactions over more
> than 20 years …

I think some people mean well, and they imagine that if we just tell people to move to some monstrosity like Filezilla the problem is solved, but realistically it’s just a good way to lose paying customers.

Charles

> 
> Kind regards,
> Patrick
> --
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> Patrick M. Hausen
> .infrastructure
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