Shutting down public FTP services

April 25th, 2017

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://ftp.security.upload.debian.org

About Debian

The Debian Project is an association of Free Software developers who volunteer their time and effort in order to produce the completely free operating system Debian.

Contact Information

For further information, please visit the Debian web pages at https://www.debian.org/, send mail to <press@debian.org>, or contact the mirror team at their public mailing list <debian-mirrors@lists.debian.org>.