Debian to shut down its public FTP servers

Debian is a mature Linux distribution that serves as the basis for many other distros, such as the Ubuntu family.

Your ‘umble scribe has been a loyal Debian user for at least a decade and has always found it to be secure, stable and reliable operating system.

Since its inception, Debian has offered downloads of its disk images by both the FTP and HTTP network protocols.

However, Debian news has now announced that its public FTP service will be closed down in November 2017.

The relevant text of the announcement is reproduced below.

After many years of serving the needs of our users, and some more of declining usage in favor of better options, all public-facing debian.org FTP services will be shut down on November 1, 2017. These are:

• ftp://ftp.debian.org
• ftp://security.debian.org

This decision is driven by the following considerations:

• FTP servers have no support for caching or acceleration.
• Most software implementations have stagnated
  and are awkward to use and configure.
• Usage of the FTP servers is pretty low as our own installer has not offered FTP as a way to access mirrors for over ten years.
• The protocol is inefficient and requires adding awkward kludges to firewalls and load-balancing daemons.

Information for users

The DNS names ftp.debian.org and ftp.<CC>.debian.org will remain the same. The mirrors should just be accessed using HTTP instead:

• http://ftp.debian.org
• http://security.debian.org

Information for developers

Our developer services will not be affected. These are the upload queues for both the main and the security archive:

• ftp://ftp.upload.debian.org
• ftp://security-master.debian.org