Hi Elliott,

On Apr 22, 2013, at 11:32 AM, enh <enh@google.com> wrote:

> i haven't been able to contact the FTP server this morning.

If you could drop me some diagnostic information (such as your local IP address and the output of traceroute) I will talk to our network engineers and try and isolate what you are seeing. Suffice it to say the service is up, so it seems likely to be a routing issue.

~$ ftp ftp.iana.org
Trying 2620:0:2d0:200::8...
Connected to ianaftp.vip.icann.org.
220 IANA FTP Server
Name (ftp.iana.org:kim): ftp
331 Please specify the password.
Password:
230 Login successful.
Remote system type is UNIX.
Using binary mode to transfer files.
ftp>

> if HTTP is the preferred download method going forward, could we get .asc files on there and have directory listings turned on for the releases directory?

In terms of the .asc files, they are there, e.g. http://www.iana.org/time-zones/repository/releases/tzdata2013c.tar.gz.asc. That said, there is no intention for HTTP to usurp FTP, they both should carry the same data and you can use either as per your preference. We also provide it via rsync which provides a convenient mechanism to ensure you have the whole repository locally.

kim