Preparing for Retirement of ARIN’s FTP Support
In September 2024, ARIN held a consultation seeking feedback from the community on retirement of our File Transfer Protocol (FTP) support. The results of that consultation led ARIN to schedule the termination of FTP support on 31 March 2025.
Past, Present, and Future of FTP
FTP was one of the first working application suites built for what was then known as ARPANET, predating email, Usenet, and even the TCP/IP stack. Now approaching 50 years old, it already has been removed from major Linux distributions as part of their default installation. Additionally, major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge) stopped supporting file downloads via FTP in 2021.
With this deprecation in mind — along with FTP’s known security issues, the adoption of HTTPS, and the support of the community — it is time to retire ARIN’s FTP service. We have offered various reports and templates via FTP since our inception, so this may leave you wondering where and how you will be able to access that data historically available through FTP.
You may have some legacy applications that retrieve data/reports from ftp.arin.net. We encourage you to audit your services that access this data to ensure you do not lose access to ARIN’s freely available information.
What do I need to do?
All resources retrieved via FTP can also be accessed via HTTPS, with their location following the exact same path as they do over FTP. The paths remain the same. So, all you need to do is change your code/scripts to use HTTPS and instead of FTP.
For example, if you have a process that accesses the NRO Transfer logs and is pulling from ftp://ftp.arin.net/pub/stats/arin/transfers/transfers_latest.json, simply change it to https://ftp.arin.net/pub/stats/arin/transfers/transfers_latest.json and you’ll retrieve the exact same data.
As part of our preparations for no longer offering the FTP service, ARIN is also working diligently with the other Regional Internet Registries to ensure that alignment, and to determine an appropriate method that will allow community members to run synchronization and mirror the data sets essential to the continued operation of services.
Want to be the first to hear about future community consultations so you can provide your feedback and help ARIN plan projects and priorities? Subscribe to the ARIN Consultations mailing list.
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