RFCs (Requests for Comments) are the official documents that define networking protocols and standards, serving as the authoritative reference for how technologies like IPv6 are designed and implemented. Understanding RFCs allows IT professionals to verify technical information at the source and gain accurate insight into how protocols actually work.
RFC Overview
A lot of these protocols are defined by RFCs, or requests for comments. But what are RFCs?
I've pulled up the RFC for IP version 6. This is what defines IP version 6. It is one of the initial IP version 6 documents, and this was created in December of 1998. It says what it obsoletes and it also says what it's related to, so it has some of that information here at the top. But essentially, what this is is it outlines what an IP version 6 address is and what it should look like. It even gets to the point of, this is an IP version 6 header format, and shows you what the format of a header is going to look like.
So it outlines all the details that people are supposed to conform to. As long as everybody conforms to this, then IP version 6 will function correctly. Everybody looks at these to do their engineering. They look at these to make sure that whatever solutions they're creating, they're engineering it correctly to work into these RFCs.
Originally it was called request for comment because it would be something that they would put out there as a, hey, could you look this over and tell me what you think? It was a way for engineers to bounce ideas off of each other. In fact, some of the stuff they put in here is kind of goofy, actually.
But what it's become now is more of a source for the standard of how we're going to implement things. So now when we see RFCs like this, this is implementing IP version 6 and how to implement it. There are also some additions: as IP version 6 has grown and changed, we've added to this, and now there are additional standards that we add to it, but we add to it by creating more RFCs that add to this standard.
One reason why this is important is that there is some misinformation out there. Getting sources from other sources and from other people is a good way to get knowledge, but you have to take some of that with a grain of salt. So it's nice to come back to the actual source and do some research on it.
I love actually geeking out over these things. I can imagine some people would think that they're a little dry, but there are some really cool aspects to how these protocols work and come together. So I think it's actually a pretty cool source of information for us to learn about these different protocols.
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