today i thought we'd talk about uh internet standards and in particularly
uh the uh request for comments the famous rfs yes he referred here in there yeah so they
started out exactly what they said on the tin as a request for comments so the very first one
rfc number one was by uh steve crocker who was one of the very early movers in uh the internet
at ucla and he published that on the 7th of april 1969 as rfc one and it really was a request for
comments it was like uh we're going to try doing these things um what do you think guys
exactly that and so he sent it around to a few people saying here's a request
for comments have you got any comments on on this and then they kind of stuck
you know pretty much all the internet standards well actually all the internet
standards are now got rfcs behind them so uh tcp and ip they're rfc 793 and 791
and there's a couple of other ones around there they grew fairly slowly because
there weren't very many standards to publish in the early days and but they they're coming quite
aware now so how does it work when one of these is published how do the comments come in that
have been requested if right well i don't know how they worked originally in back in the early days
but nowadays you you publish an rfc draft and you say here's a draft and uh this is this is
what i want to uh standardize or um some of them are informational some of them are standards like
tcpip or rfc822 i spent a lot of time with that's the internet mail standard and 821 which is smtp
so some of them are just like that that they're they define as standard some of them are sort of
these are best practices or this is kind of what we got there's quite a number of them
and i have to say i've contributed to this list that are just um humorous and often posted on
the first of april or something like that so i've actually got three with my name as author
two of them are pretty obscure now they were early days stuff to do with x25 and tcp
and another one to do with network time over x25 which nobody does anymore but perhaps my
most famous one is rfc 1606 which was an april the first one there's a little bit of history
behind it so at the time um we were running out of ip addresses something that we're still
doing to this very day and this was back in 1990 something or other this was um and the there's
this big crunch coming up that we're going to run out of ip addresses any time now it's 1994 we're
still not um we're going to happen there's lots of reasons behind that and they were discussing ipv6
which is you know this new version of uh internet protocol that hasn't exactly taken well by storm
but it's sort of gradually encroaching and there's a lot of discussions i think there are about six
proposals at the time that were internet drafts and would become rfcs and uh they'd all got
various suggestions about it so um you probably know ipv version 4 has a 32-bit addressing so
that means there's 4 billion possible places that you can address and that seems a bit limited you
know given us what eight or nine billion people on the planet if you want to give them each internet
address you can't actually do it but we get around that with nuts and things like that so at the
time we were discussing what the ipv6 addressing should be and there were various proposals there's
64 bits i think there's 60 bit there's various other things usually it was in powers of two
because they fit into words quite easily and there were one or two that were looking at 128 bit
things and at the time i wrote a short article and which wasn't actually published anywhere i just
posted it on the newsletter i think on one of the groups tcp discussions and uh
instead of saying no no this is silly we should we should think think ahead and uh
let's not go crazy let's let's fix this once and for all that was sort of my argument lots
of other people were arguing the same thing so i thought i could write a sort of paper saying no we
should go for 128 bits because um you know that's going to be far more addresses than we ever need
because the original arpanet started out with i think uh 256 addresses
they thought that would be plenty that would be all the machines you'd ever need
and then they realized it wasn't and then they went for 32 bits and said well
you know four billion addresses that's going to be more than we'll ever need
and then we came to e6 and they said well you know 64 bits that's going to be more
than we'll ever need and so i wrote a a rather spoof paper which i called
the demise of ipv version 9 originally but it got uh published as a historical perspective
on the usage of ipv9 and it was supposed to be a sort of a 22nd century look back at why ipv9 was
having to be retired because it didn't have a big enough address space so i published this out as
a sort of tug-in-cheek article and said you know the serious point about it was you know let's not
make another mistake and uh go with just a small address space what's v6 is it 64. it's 128 bits
so there should be plenty to go around for that so that that was a good thing anyway but anyway
i published this out on the network i think it was sort of february or march time about about
an hour i guess um just as a humorous thing and i published a number of similar tongue-in-cheek
articles that uh nobody took seriously luckily but this one was picked up by john postell who's
the rfc editor at the time a really lovely guy who edited all the rfcs up until his unfortunate
and timely demise i only met him once he lived on the west coast of america uh anyway he he sent me
a quick email in response to this and said uh i found it quite amusing or something um
should we could we just publish an rfc i said oh yeah yeah i guess you could what do i need to do
to do that i said it's all done taken care of and julie on the first of uh uh april it came
out as this ipv9 now the odd thing about it is that when people are looking for serious systems
like universities go out for tender to uh for a networking thing they often sort of go through all
the rfcs and say um well which ones to do with tcp which wanted to do with ip we'll make a tick list
and say they should adhere to all these standards and they often come across mine and say oh i p
version oh yeah yeah we should definitely adhere to that standard and so i've had many queries over
the years since it was published saying uh can i get an implementation of this iv version nine
say you know well have you actually read the rfc because it's probably not something you want to
uh deal with so some unwitting uh like uh system implementer is has been told your uh proposal must
adhere to all these standards and yeah all these have got ip and then title so you should adhere
to them all you know we all know rfc are standards but there's actually about 30 or 40 humorous rfcs
that you should not uh adhere to i mean there's a one that predates mine rfc 1149 which is a
transmission of ip datagrams over avian carriers so this is how to transmit tcp over pigeons
and there has been actually an implementation of that where you print out the packet you attach it
to the foot of a pigeon you send it off you catch it in the loft you then type back in
now if if we go back to one of your recent ones about pings and trace routes they actually
did a ping thing with this the ping time was several hours or whatever i'm going to say yeah
if you were lucky yeah that one has also been cited in uh you know proposals saying we should
appear to all the rfcs and uh 1149 seems to be to do ip2 so let's get that i'd like to see that
implemented like wide scale it'd be like harry potter or something i think there's been an update
to it to actually improve the performance of it what people do with their spare time is quite
quite weird what do you have to do to make an rf6 unless you're doing one of these humorous
ones usually you form a group and you get together particularly if it's something that's crucial like
internet mail or tcp ip or ipv6 you know ipv6 they deliberated about for several years before they uh
came up with they picked the one version that they were going to go with and went for so
usually you form a group you form a working group you publish drafts people comment on the drafts
you revise the drafts people comment on those they argue about them they add features a bit like any
other standardization where does the numbering come from though is there like a is there someone
that hands out a number for you yeah normally you just get the next number in the sequence so
now a few of them you do get special numbers so when they revised rfc 822 which is internet mail
standard it was coming they were in the 2000s at the time and they waited to 2822 so it got 2822
i think it's being revised again or they're always tinkering adding little bits on to
them sometimes they replace the entire standard and they say it's now being
deprecated and it's been replaced by this one so in that case you know rfc 822 was replaced with
2822 which was nice and memorable and sounds like it's crying out for a block train solution oh yeah
yes could could well be i don't know that probably somebody has considered that who knows
now what if there was a secret mathematical relationship between
p and q would that change anything what if p was actually equal to some multiple of q
like this now with different time to lives you can find out every hob on your journey very neat