[ARIN-consult] Consultation for the Retirement of FTP Protocol Use at ARIN

[John Curran]

On Sep 21, 2024, at 3:59 AM, William Herrin <bill at herrin.us> wrote:

On Fri, Sep 20, 2024 at 12:16 PM ARIN <info at arin.net> wrote:
ARIN is working to remove redundant and seldom-used services
to allow future efforts to focus on the improvement of core services,
reduce residual technical debt, and increase our security posture.
Removing the FTP protocol aligns with these objectives.

ARIN intends to remove FTP protocol support on or after 31 March 2025. We are interested in knowing:

Howdy.

Do you have any data indicating how often files are downloaded via
FTP? And from how many different sources files are downloaded over the
year?

Bill -

Good question - It appears that most of the data is extended delegation statistics files (ref: https://www.arin.net/reference/research/statistics/nro_stats/_)

Looking at the most recent data –

Files Served via FTP:
In the Month of August, there were 396,930 files served from 17,334 unique IP addresses.
(3,438 unique files downloaded during this period.)
A significant portion of these downloads consisted of:
• ARIN’s extended stats (116,673 downloads)
• Mirrors of extended stats from other RIRs (53,289 downloads)

HTTP/HTTPS Traffic for the Same FTP Data:
• We also analyzed one week of HTTP/HTTPS traffic to ftp.arin.net from August 25th to August 31st. During this week:
• 27,185 unique IPs accessed the site, resulting in 265,329 downloads.
• Extrapolating this to a full month, the data would suggest approximately 1M downloads via HTTP/HTTPS / month.

Thanks!
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
American Registry for Internet Numbers

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