RFC (Request For Comments) is the mechanism through which the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) discusses networking technologies. Internet standards are often born out of RFC, some of the more well known standards to emerge from RFC are SMTP,  HTTP, and SNMP. The IETF is an international open standards organisation, consisting of a number of groups, that develops Internet standards.

The first RFC – RFC1 emerged in 1969 entitled “Host Software” by Steve Crocker, the inventor of RFC, and opened discussions of how best to ensure communications between hosts on the ARP Network. In particular the discussion of a console control language called DEL (Decode-Encode Language) which was covered more in RFC5.

As of the time writing the latest RFC published is RFC5405 entitled “Unicast UDP Usage Guidelines for Application Designers” by Eggert and Fairhurst and talks about best practices for the application of UDP.

I am currently reading all the RFC starting from number 1 so if I do one a day, every day, it could well take over 14 years, check my progress on my RFC Review page.

Further Reading

• IETF
• Wiki: Request For Comments
• Wiki: Internet Engineering Task Force
• IETF: Request For Comments Index

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