Debian is shutting down its public FTP services

Posted Apr 26, 2017 5:47 UTC (Wed) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248)
In reply to: Debian is shutting down its public FTP services by epa
Parent article: Debian is shutting down its public FTP services

Use SFTP. If you are concerned about the lack of configuration options for the OpenSSH implementation, use a different one,for example ProFTPd which can not only do the old FTP but SFTP, too. There are clients for all OS and then some. The only thing missing is built-in support in Windows.

Debian is shutting down its public FTP services

Posted Apr 26, 2017 8:45 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm aware of SFTP but, as you can see, it hasn't reached the point of being good enough to replace FTP. The Debian project consists of some of the most technically able people on the planet, and puts a high emphasis on security and "doing the right thing". If even Debian still needs to use FTP to upload files because it hasn't been able to switch Debian developers over to some alternative like SFTP, what hope is there for those with a less technical userbase?

Debian is shutting down its public FTP services

Posted Apr 26, 2017 12:39 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

SFTP is available for Debian members, maintainers only have FTP uploads at this point. We haven't really made any concerted effort to switch to SFTP for uploads though.

Debian is shutting down its public FTP services

Posted Apr 26, 2017 18:05 UTC (Wed) by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152) [Link] (2 responses)

It's a pain for scripts though since you must use expect instead of supplying username+password as parameters and on the download side there is no support in wget and the binary version of cURL on (at least on Ubuntu) is built without support for SFTP.

Debian is shutting down its public FTP services

Posted Apr 30, 2017 19:31 UTC (Sun) by derobert (subscriber, #89569) [Link]

You can use public key authentication with sftp (the authentication is being done by ssh). That's both easier in a script and more secure than a password on the command line.

(Remember in the default kernel configuration, password on the command line shows in ps).

If you really want to write a password in a file, I think lftp (which is also an sftp client) will let you...

Debian is shutting down its public FTP services

Posted May 1, 2017 1:04 UTC (Mon) by jwoithe (subscriber, #10521) [Link]

I was looking into sftp support in various clients a couple of years ago. cURL's sftp implementation relies on libssh2; if this is present on the system at compilation time then cURL can include sftp support.