Did all of the Requests for Comments directly affect the design of Unix networks

historynetworking

I want to know more about Linux must be one of my most enduring sentiments.

But I often find that I learn the most, or perhaps just feel the most satisfied with what I have learned, when I simply crack open the history books.

What's hiding in /etc and /dev that I don't know about? Well, files. Everything is a file.

But what put those files there?

History put them where they are, and history dictated how they were written, yadda yadda yadda.

According to man hosts

   Historical Notes
       RFC 952 gave the original format for the host table, though it has since changed.

       Before the advent of DNS, the host table was the only way of resolving hostnames on the fledgling Internet.  Indeed, this file could
       be created from the official host data base maintained at the Network Information Control Center (NIC), though  local  changes  were
       often  required to bring it up to date regarding unofficial aliases and/or unknown hosts.  The NIC no longer maintains the hosts.txt
       files, though looking around at the time of writing (circa 2000), there are historical hosts.txt files on the  WWW.   I  just  found
       three, from 92, 94, and 95.

Great. So that gives me something to chew on. I want to know how Linux works, and in particular I want to know why Linux networking looks the way it does, so I'll just go read RFC 952.

But, oh, wait… It's really short. And there are hundreds of RFC documents. Hmm…

Before trying to tackle these, I have to know, did all of the Request for Comments (RFC) documents directly impact the design of Unix and Linux? Should I be trying to get my head around all of them, or just a subset?

Best Answer

No, they didn't. Some don't even apply to Unix. When Unix was in its infancy, there were dozens of operating systems out there, and dozens more came after its release. Many of them were on the ARPANet and many of them made it to the Internet. Some RFCs describe global things like the right way to write IPv6 addresses (RFC 4291), how MD5 should be implemented (RFC 1321), or why not to admire pigs flying overhead (RFC 1925). Others are more OS-specific, like Windows Kerberos password change protocols (RFC 3244).

A lot of what you see now are empirical decisions that later became standardised.

If you want to learn about Unix networking, your best bet is probably one of the books about Unix. If you want to learn about why things are the way they are, reading the source code of early Unices is an interesting exercise. But not an easy one. :)

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