The Complete April Fools' RFCs by Thomas A. Limoncelli and Peter H. Salus

Dead tree edition now available! Cheap too! Bonus material! Buy now!

Network Working Group T. A. Limoncelli, P. H. Salus
Request for Levity: 0000 rfc-humor.com

The Complete April Fools' Day RFCs

Status of this Memo

Wished you could get all the April Fools' RFCs in one place?

Imagine the geek points you'll get when your friends see this
on your coffee table or in your office. Mark your favorites.
Read them aloud to your co-workers. Gawk at the ASCII drawings
of pigeons and rubber chickens. When the network is down, this
book won't help you at all!

With a single $20 bill you can have all the RFCs plus commentary.

RFCs are the documents that the IETF publishes to document how the
Internet works. On April 1 of each year sometimes one or two are
published that are parodies. This book collects them all under one
cover in a book suitable for your coffee table, office, or hidden
somewhere so your friends don't know how geeky your humor is.

Bonus material includes commentary by Salus and Limoncelli, other
funny and historical RFCs (the ones not published in April), plus
forewords by Mike O'Dell, Scott Bradner, and Brad Templeton.

The perfect gift for the network administrator or computer scientist!

Book Cover

(Click for larger)

Table of Contents

Cover ................................................................. 0
Dedication .......................................................... iii
Contents .............................................................. v
RFCs In Chronological Order .......................................... ix
Foreword by Mike O'Dell .............................................. xi
Foreword by Scott Bradner .......................................... xiii
Foreword by Brad Templeton ........................................... xv
Preface ............................................................ xvii
Acknowledgements ..................................................... xx
About The Compilers .................................................. xx

Part I: The Very Best .................................................... 1
*RFC 3514: The Security Flag in the IPv4 Header (Evil Bit) ............ 3 Wiki
*RFC 1149: Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams
on Avian Carriers ................................... 11 Wiki
RFC 2549: IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service ............. 15 Wiki
RFC 1925: The Twelve Networking Truths ............................... 21 Wiki
RFC 2321: RITA -- The Reliable Internetwork Troubleshooting Agent .... 25 Wiki

Part II: New Protocols: Rube Goldberg would be proud .................... 31
Commentary on Part II ................................................ 33
RFC 1437: The Extension of MIME Content-Types to a New Medium ........ 35 Wiki
RFC 1926: An Experimental Encapsulation of IP Datagrams
on Top of ATM ....................................... 41 Wiki
RFC 1927: Suggested Additional MIME Types for Associating
Documents ........................................... 43 Wiki
RFC 2322: Management of IP numbers by peg-dhcp ....................... 47 Wiki
RFC 2324: Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0) ........ 55 Wiki
RFC 2325: Definitions of Managed Objects for Drip-Type
Heated Beverage Hardware Devices using SMIv2 ........ 65 Wiki
RFC 2550: Y10K and Beyond ............................................ 73 Wiki
RFC 2795: The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite (IMPS) .................. 87 Wiki
RFC 3091: Pi Digit Generation Protocol .............................. 107 Wiki
RFC 3093: Firewall Enhancement Protocol (FEP) ....................... 113 Wiki
RFC 3251: Electricity over IP ....................................... 125 Wiki
RFC 3252: Binary Lexical Octet Ad-hoc Transport ..................... 135 Wiki
RFC 4041: Requirements for Morality Sections in Routing
Area Drafts ........................................ 151 Wiki
RFC 4042: UTF-9 and UTF-18 Efficient Transformation
Formats of Unicode ................................. 159 Wiki
RFC 2410: The NULL Encryption Algorithm and Its Use With IPsec ...... 169 Wiki

Part III: Poetry in Motion ............................................. 175
Commentary on Part III .............................................. 177
RFC 527: ARPAWOCKY .................................................. 179 Wiki
RFC 968: Twas the night before start-up ............................. 181 Wiki
RFC 1121: Act One - The Poems ....................................... 183 Wiki
RFC 1605: SONET to Sonnet Translation ............................... 189 Wiki
RFC 1882: The 12-Days of Technology Before Christmas ................ 193 Wiki
RFC 2100: The Naming of Hosts ....................................... 199 Wiki

Part IV: The IPng Process and IPv6 ..................................... 203
Commentary on Part IV ............................................... 205
RFC 1606: A Historical Perspective On The Usage Of IP Version 9 ..... 207 Wiki
RFC 1607: A VIEW FROM THE 21ST CENTURY .............................. 211 Wiki
RFC 1776: The Address is the Message ................................ 225 Wiki
RFC 1924: A Compact Representation of IPv6 Addresses ................ 227 Wiki

Part V: History and Future Internet .................................... 233
Commentary on Part V ................................................ 235
RFC 748: TELNET RANDOMLY-LOSE option ................................ 237 Wiki
RFC 1097: TELNET SUBLIMINAL-MESSAGE option .......................... 239 Wiki
RFC 1216: Gigabit Network Economics and Paradigm Shifts ............. 243 Wiki
RFC 1217: Memo from the Consortium for Slow Commotion
Research (CSCR) .................................... 247 Wiki
RFC 1300: Remembrances of Things Past ............................... 253 Wiki
RFC 1313: Today's Programming for KRFC AM 1313 Internet Talk Radio .. 257 Wiki
RFC 1935: What is the Internet, Anyway? ............................. 261 Wiki
RFC 3271: The Internet is for Everyone .............................. 273 Wiki

Part VI: Mocking IETF .................................................. 279
Commentary on Part VI ............................................... 281
RFC 1438: Internet Engineering Task Force Statements
Of Boredom (SOBs) .................................. 283 Wiki
RFC 2323: IETF Identification and Security Guidelines ............... 285 Wiki
RFC 2551: The Roman Standards Process -- Revision III ............... 291 Wiki
RFC 3092: Etymology of "Foo" ........................................ 329 Wiki

Part VII: Social/Political Commentary .................................. 343
Commentary on Part VII .............................................. 345
RFC 3751: Omniscience Protocol Requirements ......................... 347 Wiki

Part VIII: Extras ...................................................... 357
Commentary on Part VIII ............................................. 359
RFC 1: Host Software ................................................ 361 Wiki
RFC 2555: 30 Years of RFCs .......................................... 373 Wiki

* indicates book contains commentary on this RFC.

Intellectual Property

IETF RFCs have a license that permits them to be republished
in books in their entirety.

The book contains exclusive material not included on this
web site.

Security Considerations

If you can't laugh at these, you may wish to examine your
own insecurities.

Authors' Address

Peter H. Salus
Thomas A. Limoncelli
rfc-humor.com

EMail: funnybook@rfc-humor.com