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Internet - RFCs

 
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What does RFC mean?

RFCs (Request For Comments) are a collection of documents which are referred to by the Internet community and which describe, specify and assist in the implementation, standardisation and discussion of the majority of norms, standards, technologies and protocols related to the Internet and networks in general.

Who writes these RFCs?

The TCP/IP protocol suite represents a collection of norms drawn up by an organisation called the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). This organisation officially publishes their reports in the form of requests, available to all, making it possible to clarify a great number of subjects relating to TCP/IP.

Each of these documents represents a specification proposal which can be made obsolete at any time by a new RFC document. So, RFCs are text files where the name is "rfcxxxx.txt" where xxxx is a number incremented for each new RFC. There are currently more than 2000, representing a size of approximately 130MB (25MB once compressed). However a number of these files have been replaced by more recent files.

In reality, anyone can write a RFC and submit it to the IETF by sending it to the coordinator: rfc.editor@rfc.editor.org. If it is accepted, it will appear after having been appraised by the coordinators. RFC1543, entitled instructions to RFC authors, explains how to compose an RFC.

What are the interesting RFCs?

The most interesting RFCs are the recent RFCs which talk about the most common protocols or services:

Specification RFC
UDP protocol RFC768
IP protocol RFC791
ICMP protocol RFC792
TCP protocol RFC793
FTP protocol RFC959
Webmail RFC822
Telnet protocol RFC854
NNTP protocol RFC977
Netbios RFC1001
SLIP protocol RFC1055
MIB RFC1156
TCP/IP RFC1180
FAQ for beginners RFC1206
FAQ for experienced users RFC1207
Network glossary RFC1208
RFCs RFC1325
MIME (MultiPurpose Mail Extension) RFC2045, RFC2046 and RFC2047
Allocation of IP addresses for intranets RFC1597
PPP protocol RFC1661
Port numbers RFC3232
HTTP protocol RFC2068
LDAPv3 protocol RFC2251
SMTP protocol RFC2821

How to obtain them?

These documents are available on a large number of FTP sites:

The website http://www.rfc-editor.org also allows these documents to be downloaded, as well as providing the opportunity to download the archive of more than 20MB containing all the RFCs. This document entitled « Internet - RFCs » from Kioskea (en.kioskea.net) is made available under the Creative Commons license. You can copy, modify copies of this page, under the conditions stipulated by the licence, as this note appears clearly.
RFCHello, What is the meaning of the RFC ( Request For Comments ) ? en.kioskea.net/forum/affich-3735-rfc
Internet - FTP FTP protocol (File Transfer Protocol) is, as its name indicates a protocol for transferring files. The implementation of FTP dates from 1971 when a file transfer system (described in RFC141) between MIT machines (Massachusetts Institute of... en.kioskea.net/internet/ftp.php3
Internet - Domain names Each computer directly connected to the Internet has at least one specific IP address. However, users do not want to work with numerical addresses such as 194.153.205.26 but with a domain name or more specifically addresses (called FQDN addresses)... en.kioskea.net/internet/dns.php3
Internet - Telnet protocol The Telnet protocol is a standard internet protocol enabling terminals and applications to interface over the Internet. This protocol provides the basic rules making it possible to link a client (system composed of a display and keyboard) to a... en.kioskea.net/internet/telnet.php3
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