The public FTP services will close starting November 1, 2017

Apr 26, 2017 22:47 GMT  ·  By

The Debian Project, a group of developers from all over the world who create one of the most popular and used free operating systems on the planet, Debian GNU/Linux, have announced that they're shutting down their FTP servers for users.

The decision to close the Debian FTP services for users was made because the FTP servers in their current state lack support for acceleration or caching, and they aren't quite used lately due to the fact that the Debian Installer no longer provides an FTP option for accessing mirrors since more than ten years ago.

The shutdown of Debian's public FTP services was also driven by the fact that the development of numerous FTP clients has stagnated, offering cumbersome configurations to users, and FTP as a protocol appears to no longer be efficient, requiring adding strange workarounds to firewalls and load-balancing daemons.

"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," reads the announcement. "Our developer services will not be affected. These are the upload queues for both the main and the security archive."

Here's what users and developers need to know

Debian Project informs Debian users about the fact that the DNS names ftp.debian.org and ftp.< CC >.debian.org will remain the same, and they can continue accessing the mirrors using the HTTP protocol. On the other hand, Debian developers should not worry too much because their services will not be affected.

This means that the upload queues for both the main (ftp://ftp.upload.debian.org) and security (ftp://security-master.debian.org) archives will be accessible to them. The rest of the world won't be able to access ftp://ftp.debian.org, nor ftp://security.debian.org starting November 1, 2017.