Re: Deprecating ftpd in the FreeBSD base system?

From: Pete Wright <pete_at_nomadlogic.org>
Date: Thu, 17 Sep 2020 12:58:22 -0700
On 9/17/20 12:49 PM, John-Mark Gurney wrote:
> Ian Lepore wrote this message on Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 09:01 -0600:
>> On Thu, 2020-09-17 at 18:43 +0400, Gleb Popov wrote:
>>> On Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 6:05 PM Cy Schubert <
>>> Cy.Schubert_at_cschubert.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I've been advocating removing FTP (and HTTP) from libfetch as well.
>>>> People
>>>> should be using HTTPS only.
>>>>
>>> Isn't this a bit too much? I often find myself in need to download
>>> something starting with "http://" or "ftp://" and use fetch for this.
>> Indeed, we have products which rely on this ability in libfetch and we
>> have to keep supporting them for many many years to come.
>>
>> I hate it when someone imperiously declares [For security reasons]
>> "People should/shouldn't be using ______".  You have no idea what the
>> context is, and thus no ability to declare what should or shouldn't be
>> used in that context.  For example, two embedded systems talking to
>> each other over a point to point link within a sealed device are not
>> concerned about man in the middle attacks or other modern internet
>> threats.
> And I really dislike when people want to make sure that their unique
> case that less than a percent of people would every hit blocks the
> security improvements for the majority of people...
>
> I've given up on a number of security improvements in FreeBSD because
> of this attitude...
>

while i tend to agree with you here - i would say that in this case 
there is a very large use case where preservation of http is very 
important to a wide base of users:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/instancedata-data-retrieval.html
https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/storing-retrieving-metadata
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/instance-metadata-service

regarding the main topic tho - dropping ftpd from base seems like a good 
iteration in clearing out cruft from the code base so we can focus on 
things with much larger user bases.  fortunately we have an excellent 
ports/pkg infrastructure to service this need if it arises.

-pete

-- 
Pete Wright
pete_at_nomadlogic.org
_at_nomadlogicLA
Received on Thu Sep 17 2020 - 17:58:31 UTC

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