RFC-141

by Darius Kazemi, May 21 2019

In 2019 I'm reading one RFC a day in chronological order starting from the very first one. More on this project here. There is a table of contents for all my RFC posts.

Nine comments on file transfer

RFC-141 is titled “Comments on RFC 141 (A File Transfer Protocol)”. It's authored by Harslem and Heafner of RAND and dated April 29th, 1971.

The technical content

The authors have provided 9 short numbered comments, so I'll just summarize each short comment by its number here.

  1. FTP is needed.
  2. Bhushan's proposal in RFC-114 seems like a good one.
  3. FTP should be able to access even files not created via FTP and perhaps this should be in the spec.
  4. In addition to being able to append to a file, they'd like support for arbitrary insertion, deletion, and replacement within a range of a file.
  5. They'd like to be able to get a list of all available files owned by the logged-in user.
  6. Since there is an “execute” function, FTP should provide status information on the job executed similar to the remote job entry system.
  7. They offer specific recommendations as to what context remote execution should happen in.
  8. They request as large an information dump as possible upon abnormal termination (of an execution, I think, though it could mean a connection) in order to aid debugging.
  9. They'd like some specific examples of experimentation with the Bhushan's protocol to date at MIT, since it was mentioned that MIT has done some experiments.

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I'm Darius Kazemi. I'm an independent technologist and artist. I do a lot of work on the decentralized web with both ActivityPub and the Dat Project. You can support my work via my Patreon.