Lecture 3: Applications #1: Intro and Telnet

Digression #1: RFCs and Internet Documentation

In this subject, we concentrate fairly heavily on the protocols and architectures used in the global Internet.

Every aspect of the Internet is documented in a series of documents called "RFCs" (Request For Comment). RFCs are the means by which new technologies are introduced in the Internet: after suitable research work has been done, the new proposals are published as an RFC. On the other hand, some RFCs document standard Internet protocols. RFCs are usually in plain text form.

Once an RFC is published, it is not changed. However, it may be "obsoleted" by later work. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to "browse" RFCs to discover which RFC is the latest on a particular topic, although there are various Web Indexes which can be useful^[1]. All RFCs are available on-line on the Internet. In Australia, they are available at several sites: in particular your lecturer's favourite (and fastest) RFC archives are at:

http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/rfc/
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/mirrors/bibliography/Distributed/rfc.html
ftp://munnari.oz.au -- probably of historical interest only

You will probably (later) need to learn how to download RFCs to answer some of the assignment questions.

^[1] See, for example, the excellent indexes at http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/ and http://www.rfc-editor.org/.

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