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Re:Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are? by userbinator on Saturday September 17, 2016 @10:35PM (#12523664)
I wonder how many of those are just mirrors of Linux distros and other open-source software, how many have more interesting things (including software), and how many of those were deliberately configured to be open for sharing. There is the somewhat-well-known filesearch.ru if you want to look for things on this non-HTTP part of the Internet. (If I remember correctly, Google used to index FTPs too and you'd get plenty of results with the right queries, but that seems to have mostly and silently disappeared...)
Re:Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are? by minxomat on Saturday September 17, 2016 @11:10PM (#12523760)
Actually most of them. It's pretty easy to eliminate them if you have the hostname entry from the scan and cross-reference with public distro mirror lists. Also exclude any edu servers and names of universities etc. If you want to look for actual files, there's hardly anything better than http://filemare.com. Crawlers like Napalm (http://www.searchftps.net/) focus more on servers that are meant to be public. Using filemare one can find the interesting things ;-)
Re:Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are? by bane on Saturday September 17, 2016 @11:45PM (#12523836)
There's still a uprising number of niche ftp site around: MSX, Demoscene, etc. Mostly older scenes that pre-date the WWW and are still around. I think it might be useful to test every port on every ip to see what happens protocol-wise. Limiting to just common ports is probably missing lots of cool things.
Re:Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are? by andai on Sunday September 18, 2016 @11:38AM (#12525700)
How many ports are there?
Re:Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are? by aeinstein1 on Sunday September 18, 2016 @12:18PM (#12525845)
According to Reserved IP addresses there are 588,514,304 reserved addresses and since there are 4,294,967,296 (2^32) IPv4 addressess in total, there are 3,706,452,992 public addresses. There are 65536 ports, so one would have to scan all those ports on all those addresses.
Re:Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are? by jldugger on Sunday September 18, 2016 @05:53PM (#12527390)
> I wonder how many of those are just mirrors of Linux distros and other open-source software

Mine are, at least.