Farewell to ftp.gen.net.uk

Farewell to ftp.gen.net.uk

Today we switched off our public FTP service. ftp.gen.net.uk had been answering requests since 1989, which makes it one of the longest-running things we have ever operated, and very probably one of the longest-running public FTP servers in the country.

It is not the first of that generation to go. We retired gopher.gen.net.uk in 2009, by which point it was more of a curiosity than a service. FTP carried on, because unlike gopher it was still doing useful work: clients used it to drop off and pick up material that was not sensitive in any way, and it did that job without fuss or instruction.

The world moved on around it. We now provide closed and private storage over SFTP, rsync and WebDAV, all authenticated, all encrypted and all properly accounted for, and that is where the work went. Use of the public server fell away steadily until what remained no longer justified keeping an anonymous, unencrypted service exposed to the internet.

Anyone looking for content that was hosted there will find it on genwiki.org, or through their private cloud storage where it relates to their own account.

Thirty-seven years of continuous service is a fair achievement for any system, and rather more than we expected of it in 1989. It owed us nothing.