RFC-179
by Darius Kazemi, June 28 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.
New link numbers
RFC-179 is titled “Link Number Assignments”, and authored by Alex McKenzie of BBn. It's dated June 22nd, 1971.
The technical content
This document updates what link numbers on ARAPNET are used for. Recall that links are, basically, physical channels.
These are the old link assignments in RFC-107:
0 control link
1 old protocol's control link - to be phased out
2 - 31 links for connections
32 - 190 reserved -- not for current use
191 to be used only for measurement work under direction
of the network measurement center (UCLA)
192 - 255 available for any private experimental use.
As of this RFC, the new link assignments are:
0 Control link
2-71 Available for connections
1, 72-190 Reserved-not for current use
191 To be used only for measurement
work under the direction of the
Network Measurement Center at UCLA
192-255 Available for private experimental use
So the big changes are: link 1 has now been phased out because nobody is supposed to use the old Host-Host Protocol anymore.
Links 2 to 71 are now available for general connection (2 to 31 were already open but now 32 to 71 are now available).
That's it!
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About me
I'm Darius Kazemi. I'm an independent technologist and artist. I do a lot of work on the decentralized web with ActivityPub, including a Node.js reference implementation, an RSS-to-ActivityPub converter, and a fork of Mastodon, called Hometown. You can support my work via my Patreon.