Request for comment

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A request for comment is one of a series, begun in 1969, of numbered Internet informational documents and standards widely followed by commercial software and freeware in the Internet and Unix communities. Few RFCs are standards but all Internet standards are recorded in RFCs. Perhaps the single most influential RFC has been RFC 822, the Internet electronic mail (email) format standard.

The RFCs issued by the IETF and its predecessors are the most well-known series known as 'RFC', and is almost always what is meant by RFC without further qualification; however, other organizations have in the past also issued series called 'RFCs'.

The RFCs are unusual in that they are floated by technical experts acting on their own initiative and reviewed by the Internet at large, rather than formally promulgated through an institution such as ANSI. For this reason, they remain known as RFCs even once adopted as standards.

The RFC tradition of pragmatic, experience-driven, after-the-fact standard writing done by individuals or small working groups has important advantages over the more formal, committee-driven process typical of ANSI or ISO.

Emblematic of some of these advantages is the existence of a flourishing tradition of joke RFCs. Usually at least one a year is published, usually on April Fool's Day.

The RFCs are most remarkable for how well they work - they manage to have neither the ambiguities that are usually rife in informal specifications, nor the committee-perpetrated misfeatures that often haunt formal standards, and they define a network that has grown to truly worldwide proportions.

RFC 1, entitled "Host Software", was issued on April 7 1969 by Steve Crocker.

For more details about RFCs and the RFC process, see RFC 2026, "The Internet Standards Process, Revision 3"

A complete RFC index in text format is available from the IETF website, but because of its length, it is impractical to include it in the Wikipedia. The text of any particular RFC can be found by entering its number at http://www.ietf.org/rfc.html.

Here is the list of the most important RFCs:

RFC 0822 RFC 0823 RFC 0824 RFC 0825

RFC 0983, RFC 0985, RFC 0987

RFC 1006, RFC 1009, RFC 1066

RFC 1123, RFC 1149, RFC 1156

RFC 1495

RFC 1521

RFC 1632

RFC 1718,

RFC 1776, RFC 1789, RFC 1792

RFC 1809, RFC 1812, RFC 1876, RFC 1889

RFC 1918, RFC 1969

RFC 2026, RFC 2045, RFC 2046, RFC 2047, RFC 2048, RFC 2049, RFC 2083

RFC 2116, RFC 2126, RFC 2156, RFC 2181, RFC 2183, RFC 2184

RFC 2223, RFC 2231

RFC 2326, RFC 2327

RFC 2401, RFC 2419, RFC 2420, RFC 2421

RFC 2525, RFC 2535, RFC 2543, RFC 2549

RFC 2644, RFC 2645, RFC 2646

RFC 2747, RFC 2748, RFC 2749

RFC 2822

RFC 3008, RFC 3023, RFC 3066, RFC 3094, RFC 3097, RFC 3098

RFC 3106, RFC 3114, RFC 3115

RFC 3261

See also: FYI, Internet standard, BCP

partially based on FOLDOC

Contents

Links to IETF RFC's

Generic RFC's

  • RFC 1718, The Tao of IETF - A Guide for New Attendees of the Internet Engineering Task Force. The IETF Secretariat, G. Malkin. November 1994. (Format: TXT=50477 bytes) (Obsoletes RFC 1539) (Also FYI0017) (Status: INFORMATIONAL) Full text of RFC 1718

Link-Level RFC's

  • RFC 2419, The PPP DES Encryption Protocol, Version 2 (DESE-bis). K. Sklower, G. Meyer. September 1998. (Format: TXT=24414 bytes) (Obsoletes RFC 1969) (Status: PROPOSED STANDARD) Full text of RFC 2419

Internetwork-Level RFC's

  • RFC 791, Internet Protocol. J. Postel. Sep-01-1981. (Format: TXT=97779 bytes) (Obsoletes RFC0760) (Also STD0005) (Status: STANDARD) Full text of RFC 0791.
  • RFC 3115, Mobile IP Vendor/Organization-Specific Extensions. G. Dommety, K. Leung. April 2001. (Format: TXT=16363 bytes) (Obsoletes RFC 3025) (Status: PROPOSED STANDARD) Full text of RFC 3115
This is about using the flow label field in IPv6. This document is merely a suggestion and does not contain any standards in it. The current standard for flow labels in IPv6 is described in RFC 3595 here.
  • RFC 2644, Changing the Default for Directed Broadcasts in Routers. D. Senie. August 1999. (Format: TXT=6820 bytes) (Updates RFC 1812) (Also BCP0034) (Status: BEST CURRENT PRACTICE) Full text of RFC 2644

Host/Router Requirements RFC's

ISO Interoperation RFC's

  • RFC 2126, ISO Transport Service on top of TCP (ITOT). Y. Pouffary, A. Young. March 1997. (Format: TXT=51032 bytes) (Updates RFC 1006) (Status: PROPOSED STANDARD) Full text of RFC 2126

Domain Name System RFC's

This covers the operation of secondary domain name servers.
  • RFC 3008, Domain Name System Security (DNSSEC) Signing Authority. B. Wellington. November 2000. (Format: TXT=13484 bytes) (Updates RFC 2535) (Status: PROPOSED STANDARD) Full text of RFC 3008

X.500 RFC's

See also X.500
  • RFC-2116, X.500 Implementations Catalog-96. C. Apple, K. Rossen. April 1997. (Format: TXT=243994 bytes) (Obsoletes RFC 1632) (Also FYI0011) (Status: NFORMATIONAL) Full text of RFC 2116

Network Management RFC's

E-Mail RFC's

This is an important early RFC from the IETF that specified the format of e-mail messages exchanged between computers on the Internet. Many additions have been made to it, but it remained a standard for many years until obsoleted by RFC 2822 (the number is not a coincidence: it was reserved for this use).
This standard specifies a syntax for text messages that are sent between computer users, within the framework of electronic mail messages. This standard is about text-only messages. The syntax for sending other types of messages, such as binary or structured data, is specified as an extension of this standard by the MIME document series: RFC 2045, RFC 2046, RFC 2049.
  • RFC 3098, How to Advertise Responsibly Using E-Mail and Newsgroups or - how NOT to $$$$$ MAKE ENEMIES FAST! $$$$$. E. Gavin, D. Eastlake 3rd, S. Hambridge. April 2001. (Format: TXT=64687 bytes) (Also FYI0038) (Status: INFORMATIONAL) Full text of RFC 3098

X.400 E-Mail RFC's

MIME RFC's

RFC 2047 specifies a standard way of encoding non US-ASCII characters into a string that identifies both the character set to use and the actual characters. The result of the encoding will be US-ASCII, and can be transmitted in Internet mail and decoded appropriately on the receiving end. This encoding is necessary in the first place because many characters in non-English languages can not be represented in 7-bit ASCII.
There are some mail clients that are not RFC 2047 Compliant, if you are using one of this clients you are strongly encuraged to change your mail client or to update it to a compliant version:
Eudora 4: Double quote characters are encoded with a Windows codpage and are eight-bit characters. Eudora's MIME headers indicate the MIME type but not 8-bit encoding. Suggest enabling "quoted printable" encoding.

April 1st RFC's

  • RFC 2549, IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service, D. Waitzman. Apr-01-1999. (Format: TXT=9519 bytes) (Updates RFC1149) (Status: INFORMATIONAL) Full text of RFC 2549
This is a humorous RFC by the IETF. It was written by D. Waitzman and released on April Fool's Day 1999; it is an April 1st RFC. It updates Waitzman's earlier RFC 1149 about the transmission of IP traffic via carrier pigeons.

Random Support RFC's

  • RFC 3097, RSVP Cryptographic Authentication -- Updated Message Type Value. R. Braden, L. Zhang. April 2001. (Format: TXT=6320 bytes) (Updates RFC 2747) (Status: PROPOSED STANDARD) Full text of RFC 3097
  • RFC 2747, RSVP Cryptographic Authentication. F. Baker, B. Lindell, M. Talwar. January 2000. (Format: TXT=49477 bytes) (Updated by RFC 3097) (Status: PROPOSED STANDARD) Full text of RFC 2747

Random Application RFC's

  • RFC 1789, INETPhone: Telephone Services and Servers on Internet. C. Yang. April 1995. (Format: TXT=14186 bytes) (Status: INFORMATIONAL) Full text of RFC 1789
  • RFC 3066, Tags for the Identification of Languages. H. Alvestrand. January 2001. (Format: TXT=26522 bytes) (Obsoletes RFC1766) (Also BCP0047) (Status: BEST CURRENT PRACTICE) Full text of RFC 3066
This provides a way to register extensions of codes for language names in ISO 639. The current reviewer of new tags and maintainer of the registry is Michael Everson. An alternative for language codes is the Ethnologue.
See also Registry
  • RFC 3106, ECML v1.1: Field Specifications for E-Commerce. D. Eastlake, T. Goldstein. April 2001. (Format: TXT=40715 bytes) (Obsoletes RFC 2706) (Status: INFORMATIONAL) Full text of RFC 3106

Random RFC's

  • RFC 0823 DARPA Internet gateway. R.M. Hinden, A. Sheltzer. Sep-01-1982. (Format: TXT=62620 bytes) (Updates IEN 109, IEN 30) (Status: HISTORIC) Full text of RFC 0823
This is a memo and status report of the DARPA Internet Gateway. It deals with two areas: gateway procedures and message formats. Topics include information on the forwarding of internet datagrams, various protocols supported by the gateway, and specific gateway software. Unlike many other RFCs, it does not list any implementation specifics.
  • RFC 0824 CRONUS Virtual Local Network. W.I. MacGregor, D.C. Tappan. Aug-25-1982. (Format: TXT=58732 bytes) (Status: UNKNOWN) Full text of RFC 0824
  • RFC 3094, Tekelec's Transport Adapter Layer Interface. D. Sprague, R. Benedyk, D. Brendes, J. Keller. April 2001. (Format: TXT=265099 bytes) (Status: INFORMATIONAL) Full text of RFC 3094

External links

References

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