RFC-40

by Darius Kazemi, Feb 9 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.

Detailed errors and statuses

RFC-40 is by Eric Harslem and John Heafner of RAND and is a direct follow-up to their RFC-39, in response to a request from Steve Crocker to provide more detail. It's called “More Comments on the Forthcoming Protocol” and is dated March 1970.

The technical content

They specify the error codes more precisely here, assigning numeric ranges to them:

The ranges of <Code> are shown below in hexidecimal.

     00     Unspecified error types
     10-0F  Resource errors
     10-1F  Status errors
     20-2F  Content errors
     30-3F  Unused

(I assume that first 10-0F should read 01-0F. Unclear if that was a transcription error or an error in the original doc.)

The document goes on to list the specific errors and codes, which I won't repeat here.

They expand the definition of the “query” command to specify the payload of the text field, which wasn't specified in RFC-39.

They seem to change the mechanism of the HOST Status command from a kind of interrupt driven thing (“I am up! I am down”!) to a more passive thing where when a HOST goes up it broadcasts a message to all the NCPs which have to keep track of the state of the remote HOSTs. I think. I could have this wrong, it's possible this is an additional feature on top of the ones described in RFC-39 rather than replacing the functionality. (At least I kind of hope it is, requiring everyone to keep state like that seems... a lot.)

Analysis

Assigning numerical ranges to errors using the most significant digit to categorize them is really similar to what we see today with HTTP status codes:

100 - 199 Informational
200 - 299 Success
300 - 399 Redirection
400 - 499 Client Error
500 - 599 Server Error

This way even if you don't personally remember what an error 474 is, you at least know it's a client error before looking it up. I'm sure it was common practice in computing long before this but it's interesting to note these parallels.

Further reading

Now seems a good time to mention that this blog was partially inspired by Evert Pot's blog series on the HTTP status codes!

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About me

I'm Darius Kazemi. I'm a Mozilla Fellow and I do a lot of work on the decentralized web with both ActivityPub and the Dat Project.