RFC-217
by Darius Kazemi, August 5 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.
Changes to UCSB services
RFC-217 is titled “Specification Changes for OLS, RJE/RJOR, and SMFS”. It's authored by Jim White of UCSB and dated September 8, 1971.
The technical content
This RFC issues four revisions.
First, since literally nobody has tried to connect to the Network Control Program described in RFC-74, they have taken down that service.
Second, the Remote Job Entry (RJE) protocol outlined in RFC-105 used to throw away the first 8 bits of a message in order to ignore the “message type” field. Since that field is no longer in the RFC-107 version of the Host-Host Protocol, the RJE no longer expects to receive that spurious data.
Third, RJE now uses the Initial Connection Protocol to connect instead of its own unique system.
Fourth, RJE and the Simple-Minded File System now use an 8-bit byte when sending data to a remote user. (They still accept any declared byte size for incoming traffic.)
Analysis
All of these revisions really stem from making their services compliant with the RFC-107 version of the Host-Host Protocol.
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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.