Due to a change of job I’ve recently had to teach myself about networking.
RFCs had always been a bit of a mystery to me but since they came up over and over again when reading about network concepts I thought I’d familiarise myself with them as a whole.
With a quick:
apt-get install rfc-doc
an organised set of RFCs was downloaded and categorised into various folders under /usr/share/doc/RFC. I looked closely at these three:
best-current-practice
for-your-information
standard
and skimmed the rest:
draft-standard, experimental, historic, informational, links, old, proposed-standard, queue, unclassified
Here’s some of the many things I learned by looking through them and reading a good proportion of the active ones:
– There’s a ‘Service Location Protocol’ specification (RFC2608) which anticipates the need for scalable service discovery. Which begs the question: why are we all reinventing the wheel now? There are implementations already written and available (slpd, slptool). Beats me.
– There’s a very handy glossary of internet terms which is still useful (RFC1983), even though written in 1996, is still useful.
– They’re very well written. Really basic things like NFS (RFC1094) and UTF-8 (RFC3629) are explained in a clear and straightforward way.
– There’s nothing quite like dropping the phrase ‘if you read the current RFC on the subject…’ into a meeting.
– The IT Crowd was right – the ‘elders of the internet’ really do exist (RFC1462 – What is the Internet).
Who Governs the Internet?
In many ways the Internet is like a church […] It appoints a council of elders, which has responsibility for the technical management and direction of the Internet.
I’m off to Big Ben to commune with Stephen Hawking.
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For historical context, pick up Padlipsky’s ” “Elements of Networking Style”. Exactly 1 of the first 1000 RFCs had any telco input whatsoever. In fact, a mega debate was carried on for years before, as we now know, IP networking took over, and telcos shrank to irrelevance. Padlipsky addresses the great issues in a sarcastic and irreverent manner. I am forever indebted to him for coining the term “technotheological”.
HTH
The RFCs deb package is doc-rfc and apt search doc-rfc will list out the package options.
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