RFC-317
by Darius Kazemi, November 13 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.
Reserving more links for measurement
RFC-317 is titled “Official Host-Host Protocol Modification: Assigned Link Numbers”. It's authored by Jon Postel and dated March 20, 1972.
The technical content
Recall that links are the term used for each of the 256 “channels” that you can communicate over the network on. So for example, you can connect from one computer to another by reserving link number 38, and while you are using that link, nobody else can use it.
The last official documentation of link numbers was in RFC-179 in June 1971. In that RFC, link assigments were listed as:
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
In this new RFC, links 159 through 190 have been opened up for network measurement by the Network Measurement Center.
Links 192-195 are being used for the “Message Switching Protocol experiment
”. More on this to come in RFC-333. The new assignment table is:
0 Control Link
2-71 Available for Connection
1, 72-158 Reserved--not for current use
159-191 To be used only for measurement work
under the direction of the Network
Measurement Center at UCLA
192-195 To be used for the Message Switching
Protocol experiment
196-255 Available for private experimental use
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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.