Retirement of FTP and HTTP Access to Network Dataless SEED Volumes at IRIS
This article is a public service announcement that the IRIS DMC will discontinue maintaining a dataless SEED repository at the DMC, currently hosted online at http://ds.iris.edu/pub/RESPONSES/DATALESS_SEEDS/. These are known as Network Dataless SEED files and will continue to be available via ftp or http through the calendar year 2018 only, ceasing to be updated on Jan 1, 2019. These have historically been updated when new metadata was received from operators, and has served the community as a collection point for the hundreds of active networks that reported these to the FDSN archive at IRIS.
The reasons this is being disabled include the fact that metadata has increased in volume, and no longer fits well within the SEED framework, (for example a dataless volume cannot contain more than 999 stations), and we are providing equivalent, highly available, and more accurate metadata through the Federated Web Services protocols that have become increasingly popular now. We encourage users that have been using this repository to begin using StationXML format metadata that is available using http://service.iris.edu/fdsnws/station/1/
We have reviewed the information in the ftp and http access logs and believe that we have contacted the primary users of this repository, and final approval was received from the Data Services Standing Committee (DSSC) on July 22, 2018.
by Rick Benson (IRIS-DMC)