RFC-348

by Darius Kazemi, December 14 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.

Discard process

RFC-348 is titled “Discard Process”. It's authored by Jon Postel of UCLA and dated May 30, 1972.

The technical content

This is another of Postel's batch of RFCs submitted on May 30. It proposes a discard process: unlike the echo process of RFC-347, this process will listen for requests from remote hosts, open the connection, and then immediately discard any data that is sent.

Analysis

Postel says this is useful for debugging but doesn't specify further than that. I'm guessing that it would be good for debugging “what happens if I send data to a valid, open remote process but never get a reply”?

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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.