Windows NT TCP/IP Network Administration

Retrieving RFCs

Throughout this book, we have referred to many RFCs. These are the Internet documents used for everything from general information to the definitions of the TCP/IP protocols standards. As a network administrator, there are several important RFCs that you’ll want to read. The anonymous FTP example in the previous section shows one method to obtain them.

RFCs are stored at ds.internic.net in the rfc directory. It stores the RFCs with filenames in the form rfcnnnn.txt or rfcnnnn.ps—where nnnn is the RFC number, and txt or ps indicates whether the RFC is ASCII text or PostScript. Anonymous FTP is generally a very quick way to get an RFC, if you know what you want.

To help you find out which RFC you do want, get the rfc-index.txt file. It is a complete index of all RFCs by RFC number, and it’s also available from ds.internic.net in the rfc directory. You’ll only need to get a new RFC index occasionally. Most of the time, the RFC you’re looking for has been in publication for some time and is already listed in the index. Retrieve the RFC index and store it on your system. Then search it for references to the RFCs you’re interested in.

RFCs are also available via the World Wide Web at http://www.internic.net. Follow the links from that home page through the directory services to the IETF RFC page. The page allows you to search the RFCs for keywords or to load the RFC index. The index is particularly useful if you know the number of the RFC you want. Figure 13-4 shows a network ...