The TCP/IP protocol standards that define how the Internet works are managed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). However, the IETF doesn’t impose standards. Instead, it simply oversees the process by which ideas are developed into agreed-upon standards.
An Internet standard is published in the Request for Comments (RFC) document. When a document is accepted for publication, it is assigned an RFC number by the IETF. The RFC is then published. After it’s published, an RFC is never changed. If a standard is enhanced, the enhancement is covered in a separate RFC.
At the time of this writing, more than 3,500 RFCs were available from the IETF website (www.ietf.org). The oldest RFC is RFC 0001, published in April, 1969. It describes how the host computers communicated with each other in the original ARPANET. The most recent RFC (as of February, 2010) is RFC 5777, a proposed standard entitled “Traffic Classification and Quality of Service (QoS) Attributes for Diameter.”
Not all RFCs represent Internet standards. The following paragraphs summarize the various types of RFC documents:
Internet Standards Track: This type of RFC represents an Internet standard. Standards Track RFCs have one of three maturity levels, as described in the following table. An RFC enters circulation with Proposed Standard status but may be elevated to Draft Standard status - and, ultimately, to Internet Standard status.
| Maturity Level | Description |
|---|---|
| Proposed Standard | Proposed standards are generally stable, have resolved known design choices, are believed to be well understood, have received significant community review, and appear to enjoy enough community interest to be considered valuable. |
| Draft Standard | Draft standards are well understood and known to be quite stable. At least two interoperable implementations must exist, developed independently from separate code bases. The specification is believed to be mature and useful. |
| Internet Standard | Internet Standards have been fully accepted by the Internet community as highly mature and useful standards. |
Experimental specifications: These are a result of research or development efforts. They’re not intended to be standards, but the information they contain may be of use to the Internet community.
Informational specifications: These simply provide general information for the Internet community.
Historic specifications: These RFCs have been superceded by a more recent RFC and are thus considered obsolete.
Best Current Practice (BCP): RFCs are documents that summarize the consensus of the Internet community’s opinion on the best way to perform an operation or procedure. BCPs are guidelines, not standards.
| RFC | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 768 | August 1980 | User Datagram Protocol (UDP) |
| 791 | September 1981 | Internet Protocol (IP) |
| 792 | September 1981 | Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) |
| 793 | September 1981 | Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) |
| 826 | November 1982 | Ethernet Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) |
| 950 | August 1985 | Internet Standard Subnetting Procedure |
| 959 | October 1985 | File Transfer Protocol (FTP) |
| 1034 | November 1987 | Domain Names — Concepts and Facilities (DNS) |
| 1035 | November 1987 | Domain Names — Implementation and Specification (DNS) |
| 1939 | May 1996 | Post Office Protocol Version 3 (POP3) |
| 2131 | March 1997 | Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) |
| 2236 | November 1997 | Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) (Updates RFC 1112) |
| 2616 | June 1999 | Hypertext Transfer Protocol — HTTP/1.1 |
| 2821 | April 2001 | Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) |
dummies
Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/network-administration-ntcpip-standards-and-rfcs.html
No comments:
Post a Comment