RFCs

Notes

An RFC is a Request For Comments document. RFCs can be standards-in-the-making, notes about problems and possible solutions, notes about practices, prescriptions of policies, and anything else that needs to be published to the technical Internet community at large. After being debated and commented, an RFC can become an STD or perhaps a BCP. An STD is an Internet standard, and a BCP is documentation of a Best Current Practice. These documents are a goldmine when it comes to understanding the more technical sides of the Internet. You can read more about STDs in STD 1 and BCPs in BCP 1. The official RFC, STD, and BCP archive is at ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/, but you also should see http://www.rfc-editor.org/. My favorite RFC archive is ftp://sunsite.uio.no/pub/rfc". It has all these documents.

Current

RFC 952. K. Harrenstien, M. Stahl, and E. Feinler. "DOD Internet Host Table Specification." October 1985. Obsoletes RFC 810 and RFC 608. This restricts names to A Z, 0 9, "-" (dash, minus), and "." (period), and sets a number of other restrictions.

RFC 974, STD 14. Craig Partridge. "Mail Routing and the Domain System." January 1986.

RFC 1032. M. Stahl. "Domain Administrators Guide." November 1987. Explains how to register a domain with (now defunct) NIC and DDN and gives guidelines for establishing and administrating a domain.

RFC 1033. M. Lottor. "Domain Administrators Operations Guide." November 1987. This explains DNS for administrators; familiarity with the concepts is assumed.

RFC 1034. P. Mockapetris. "Domain Names Concepts and Facilities." November 1987. Obsoletes RFCs 882, 883, and 973. Recommended reading.

RFC 1035. STD 13. P. Mockapetris, "Domain Names Implementation and Specification." November 1987. This is the base DNS standard. It has been amended and updated in other documents.

RFC 1123. R. Braden, editor. "Requirements for Internet Hosts Application and Support." October 1989.

RFC 1183. C. Everhart, et al. "New DNS RR Definitions." October 1990. Updates RFCs 1034 and 1035. Quite a few new RRs were introduced in this RFC.

RFC 1321. R. Rivest and RSA Data Security. "The MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm." April 1992. MD5 is a cryptographic hash, or "fingerprint," function. It is, among other things, used in conjunction with HMAC; see RFC 2104.

RFC 1535. E. Gavron. "A Security Problem and Proposed Correction With Widely Deployed DNS Software." October 1993.

RFC 1591. J. Postel. "Domain Name System Structure and Delegation." March 1994.

RFC 1597. V. Rekhter, et. al. "Address Allocation for Private Internets." March 1994. This is the RFC that specifies which address ranges can be used for internal, private networks.

RFC 1700, STD 2. J. Reynolds and J. Postel. "Assigned Numbers." October 1994. Obsoletes RFCs 1340, 1060, 1010, 990, 960, 943, 923, 900, 870, 820, 790, 776, 770, 762, 758, 755, 750, 739, 604, 503, 433, and 349, and IENs 127, 117, and 93. This document summarizes all the numbers assigned to various things by IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) numbers such as the well-known port number of services, (http is on port number 80), the IP protocol numbers of TCP (6) and UDP (17), and so on.

RFC 1706. B Manning and R. Colella. "DNS NSAP Resource Records." October 1994. Obsoletes RFC 1637 and 1348.

RFC 1713, FYI 27. A. Romao. "Tools for DNS Debugging." November 1994.

RFC 1876. C. Davis, et. al. "A Means for Expressing Location Information in the Domain Name System." January 1996. Updates RFCs 1034 and 1035.

RFC 1886. S. Thomson and C. Huitema. "DNS Extensions to Support IP Version 6," December 1995.

RFC 1912. D. Barr. "Common DNS Operational and Configuration Errors." February 1996. Obsoletes RFC 1537.

RFC 1995. M. Ohta. "Incremental Zone Transfer in DNS." August 1996. Updates RFC 1035. This introduces the IXFR mechanism.

RFC 1996. P. Vixie. "A Mechanism for Prompt Notification of Zone Changes." August 1996. This is the DNS NOTIFY standard.

RFC 2010. B. Manning and P. Vixie. "Operational Criteria for Root Name Servers." October 1996. Covers running root nameservers in the year 1996.

RFC 2050, BCP 12. K. Hubbard, et. al. "Internet Registry IP Allocation Guidelines." November 1996. Obsoletes RFC 1466.

RFC 2052. A. Gulbrandsen and P. Vixie. "A DNS RR for Specifying the Location of Services (DNS SRV)." October 1996.

RFC 2065. D. Eastlake III and C. Kaufman. "Domain Name System Security Extensions." January 1997. Obsoleted by RFC 2535. Updates RFCs 1034 and 1035. Describes the DNS records needed to implement DNS security, DNSSEC, and the procedures and practices associated with it.

RFC 2104. H. Krawczyk. "HMAC: Keyed-Hashing for Message Authentication." February 1997. TSIG is based on this.

RFC 2136. P. Vixie, editor. "Dynamic Updates in the Domain Name System (DNS UPDATE)." April 1997. Updates RFC 1035.

RFC 2137. D. Eastlake. "Secure Domain Name System Dynamic Update." April 1997. Updates RFC 1035.

RFC 2163. C. Allocchio. "Using the Internet DNS to Distribute MIXER Conformant Global Address Mapping (MCGAM)." January 1998. Obsoletes RFC 1664. This RFC defines the PX RR.

RFC 2181. Elz and Bush. "Clarifications to the DNS Specification." July 1987. Updates RFCs 1034, 1035, and 1123. This RFC clarifies several problematic areas in RFCs 1034 and 1035. See also RFC 1123. Recommended reading.

RFC 2182, BCP 16. R. Elz, et. al. "Selection and Operation of Secondary DNS Servers." July 1997. Recommended reading.

RFC 2219, BCP 17. M. Hamilton and R. Wright. "Use of DNS Aliases for Network Services." October 1997. Recommendations about CNAME use. Recommended reading.

RFC 2230. R. Atkinson. "Key Exchange Delegation Record for the DNS." November 1997. This RFC defines a mechanism for IP-SEC to locate key servers.

RFC 2308. M. Andrews. "Negative Caching of DNS Queries." March 1998. Updates RFCs 1034 and 1035. This RFC is the basis for negative caching and the $TTL zone file directive.

RFC 2317, BCP 20. H. Eidnes, et. al. "Classless IN-ADDR.ARPA Delegation." March 1998. Recommended reading.

RFC 2403. C. Madson and R. Glenn. "The Use of HMAC-MD5-96 within ESP and AH." November 1998. This discusses the use of HMAC-MD5, used in DNS-SEC/TSIG, for IP-SEC.

RFC 2535. D. Eastlake. "Domain Name System Security Extensions." March 1999. Updates RFCs 2181, 1035, and 1034. Obsoletes 2065.

RFC 2671. P. Vixie. "Extension Mechanisms for DNS (EDNS0)." August 1999. This extension overcomes some limitations in the DNS network protocol and provides a way for resolvers to announce their capabilities to servers.

RFC 2672. M. Crawford. "Non-Terminal DNS Name Redirection." August 1999. This RFC specifies the DNAME RR, which pretty much amounts to a symbolic link from one domain to another domain, creating a powerful alias mechanism.

RFC 2874. M. Crawford and C. Huitema. "DNS Extensions to Support IPv6 Address Aggregation and Renumbering." July 2000. This introduces the A6 RR.

Related

RFC 1101. P. Mockapetris. "DNS Encoding of Network Names and Other Types." April 1989. Updates RFCs 1034 and 1035. Outlines different methods for using DNS to encode various local information. These methods do not appear to be in use.

RFC 1122. R. Branden, editor. "Requirements for Internet Hosts Communication Layers." October 1989.

Historical Documents

Here are some obsolete but still interesting documents:

RFC 799. D.L. Mills. "Internet Name Domains." September 1981. The problems with the HOSTS.TXT file is discussed, and domains are discussed in the context of internet mail. Here, domains are seen as associated with the various network types, such as ARPANET, DCENET, and MIT's CHAOSNET.

RFC 805. J. Postel. "Computer Mail Meeting Notes." February 1982. Notes from a meeting where the use of domain names, rather than a completely flat space of hostnames, was the conclusion. The need for nameservers was seen, and the general requirements of such a service were discussed. One of the action items from this meeting was "Host Name Server Description."

RFC 819. Z. Su and J. Postel. "The Domain Naming Convention for Internet User Applications." August 1982. The domain name scheme is discussed in more detail. The initial TLD is revealed to be ARPA.

RFC 830. Zaw-Sing Su. "A Distributed System for Internet Name Service." October 1982. This proposes SINS (System for Internet Name Service) with DNS as an element.

RFC 882. P. Mockapetris. "Domain Names Concepts and Facilities." November 1983. This RFC describes DNS as we know it. It discusses the problems with the hosts.txt file and the design goals and considerations that went into the solution: DNS. The overall design is still the same.

RFC 883. P. Mockapetris. "Domain Names Implementation and Specification." November 1983. This memo discusses the implementation in more detail, including additional problems it has to solve in heterogeneous internets. It then goes into detail about the query and response formats and how names resolve.

RFC 920. J. Postel and J. Reynolds. "Domain Requirements." October 1984. The end of the ARPA TLD is announced, and the new, now familiar TLDs of GOV, EDU, COM, MIL, and ORG, as well as the use of ISO-3166 country codes for national entities, are introduced.

RFC 953. K. Harrenstien, M. Stahl, and E. Feinler. "Hostname Server." October 1985. Obsoletes RFC 811. This specifies a hostname server implemented at SRI.

RFC 973. P. Mockapetris. "Domain System Changes and Observations." January 1986. This updates RFCs 882 and 883 based on the experience with DNS thus far.

RFC 1010. J. Reynolds and J. Postel. "Assigned Numbers." May 1987. A frequently referenced RFC, since replaced by RFC 1700.

RFC 1032. M. Stahl. "Domain Administrators Guide." November 1987. Covers how to register a domain with the NIC.

RFC 1367. C. Topolcic. "Schedule for IP Address Space Management Guidelines." October 1992. Obsoleted by RFC 1467. This and RFC 1467 provide a historical perspective on the use of classless subnets.

RFC 1467. C. Topolcic. "Status of CIDR Deployment in the Internet." August 1993. Obsoletes RFC 1367. Obsoleted by RFC 2050.

RFC 1664. Allocchio, et. al. "Internet DNS for Mail Mapping Tables." August 1994. Obsoleted by RFC 2163.