The Twelve Networking Truths

According to Wikipedia: Request for Comments (RFC) is a publication in a series, from the principal technical development and standards-setting bodies for the Internet, most prominently the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

This is one of the prime matters from a knowledge perspective in the networking area, as standards develop and/or protocols evolve, new RFC are published in order to reflect these innovations.

Note that RFC is kind of a misnomer, since there are not actual comments in the RFC’s themselves, comments are made during their creation process, this is what IETF calls drafting, which is the oficial term meaning the standard is in the process of being discussed and comments are added within a Working Group (WG) where engineers brainstorm and provide their perspective as to what the standard should be, what problems should solve, what procedures should follow, terminologies, and compatibility with previous standards.

As a personal note, first time I ever encountered an RFC was probably while in a CompTIA course named ‘IT Essentials I’, where private and public IP addressing was mentioned and RFC1918 was referenced as the source. Since then, I have been reading this material as part of the main sources of preparation for different certifications (Note I would probably do a blog on my study methology later in case it helps someone out there).

Besides existing ‘serious’ RFC’s, there are some funny ones, too. Each April a new ‘April fool’s’ RFC out, many exists, but the most famous is RFC1925 titled ‘The Twelve Networking Truths’, every networking engineer should read this.

Have fun : ),

Elvin