Illustrated TCP/IP by Matthew G. Naugle Wiley Computer Publishing, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN: 0471196568   Pub Date: 11/01/98

Chapter 11
TCP/IP Protocol Documents

Complete details of a Request for Comments (RFC) document are contained in RFC 1543. If TCP/IP is such an open protocol, where does one find out information on the protocol and other items of interest on the Internet? RFCs define the processing functions of this protocol, and these documents are available online or may be purchased. Online, they may be found on any of the three registries: InterNIC (US), RIPE (Europe), and APNIC (Asia Pacific).

For example, point your Web browser to http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc–index.txt and review the latest index (updated almost daily) of RFCs. My suggestion is that you save this as a file in your local computer. You will return many times to this document to find more information about a particular aspect of a protocol. Use the Find tool under the Edit pulldown menu to provide a search. Be careful: Just because you type in a word, the search engine may not find specifically what you are looking for, so you may have to know a few things before venturing forth, but for the most part, this is the best method of weeding through the RFCs.

After finding an RFC, change rfc–index on the URL to rfcxxxx.txt, where x is the RFC number, and you now have the RFC online. I suggest that you save the RFCs that you will return to the most on your local directory—they can take some time to download.

A majority of individuals are trusting the statements of a company’s implementation of the TCP/IP protocols more than what is written in an RFC. The RFC is the definitive document for the TCP/IP protocol suite. I asked some systems engineers who I know two things:

•  When was the last time you reviewed a question by reading an RFC?

•  Have you read RFC 1812, 1122, and 1123?

The answer to the first question is generally, “I don’t know” (occasionally, I got the response, “Hey Matt, get a life!”), and the answer to the second question is, “What’s in those RFCs?” How any systems engineers can claim that they know the TCP/IP protocol (as always indicated on their résumés, along with knowledge of 100 other protocols and applications) without having read these three RFCs? The Web makes it so easy to review an RFC: Simply point your browser to ds.internic.net/rfc/rfcxxxx.txt, or for an index to ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc–index.txt. Get the RFC electronically, save it, and then use the search commands to find what you are looking for.