Peter McBrien's Internet Manual

The following table contains a selection of important Internet RFCs, with a link to the original text file version of the RFC, plus links to versions of that file formatted as Postscript (best version for printing out) and PDF (best version for online viewing) files, both set to A4 paper size.

Data Link Layer
Keyword RFC Description Text PS PDF
ARP 826 The Address Resolution Protocol allows a host to find the MAC address associated with a particular IP address on a network. text ps pdf
RARP 903 Reverse ARP. text ps pdf

Network Layer
Keyword RFC Description Text PS PDF
IPv4 791 Description of version 4 of the Internet Protocol, which is the version used by the vast majority of hosts on the the Internet at present. text ps pdf
Subnets 950 IPv4 subnets, which are commonly used to divide the `networks' of IPv4 into sub networks within an organisation. text ps pdf
Broadcast 922 Details the addressing issues associated with broadcasts over IPv4 subnets, where data is sent to all hosts on a network or subnet. text ps pdf
IPv6 2460 New version of the Internet Protocol, giving a much larger address space, and more control over QoS. text ps pdf

Transport Layer
Keyword RFC Description Text PS PDF
ICMP 792 The Internet Control Message Protocol, which allows hosts to check on the existance of routes and other hosts on the Internet. text ps pdf
IGMP 1112 The Internet Group Management Protocol, which allows data to be sent to a group of users distributed over differnet networks by mulitcasting text ps pdf
UDP 768 The User Datagram Protocol, which gives application programmes access to the `raw' IP protocol --- i.e. provides an connectionless data transfer service. text ps pdf
TCP 793 The Transmission Control Protocol, which builds a reliable data transfer services on top of IP. text ps pdf
OSPF 2328 Version 2 of the Open Shortest Path First Protocol, which provides an implemention of the link state algorithm to use as an IGP. text ps pdf
ICMPv6 2463 ICMP to work over IPv6. text ps pdf

Application Layer
Keyword RFC Description Text PS PDF
SMTP 821 The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, used for most of the mail transfer on the Internet, with the exception of the client fetching user mail from the server. text ps pdf
DNS 1034 The Domain Name System, which maps domain names such as www.doc.ic.ac.uk to IP addresses such as 146.169.1.36. text ps pdf
FTP 959 The File Transfer Protocol is used to transfer entire files between hosts on the Internet. text ps pdf
HTTP 2068 Version 1.1 of the Hypertext transfer protocol, used to obtain data from a web server. text ps pdf
IMAP 1064 Version 2 of the Interactive mail access protocol, used for clients to receive and send email. text ps pdf
NTPv3 1305 Version 3 of the Network Time Protocol, used for distributing the correct time over the Internet. text ps pdf
RIP 2453 Version 2 of the Routing Information Protocol, which provides an implemention of the distance vector algorithm to use as an IGP. text ps pdf
URL 1738 Uniform Resource Locators give a standard way of nameing a socket, protocol and item to be fetched/sent using the protocol. text ps pdf
LDAPv3 2251 Version 3 of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, which allows IP based access to X.500 type diretory systems, which (unlike DNS) support a general directory system in which all types of information may be stored and searched for. text ps pdf
LDAPSearch 2254 Standard string representation of LDAP search strings for use in queries submitted to an LDAP server. text ps pdf
LDAPURL 2255 Representation of LDAP searches as an URL. text ps pdf

Overview
Keyword RFC Description Text PS PDF
Protocols 3700 A listing of all current official Internet protocols, giving the RFC to refer to for each protocol. text ps pdf
Numbers 1700 Listing of the Assigned Numbers: numeric constants associated with protocols and networks: this is an obsolete document, replaced by an online database. text ps pdf
Numbers 3232 Online version of RFC1700 text ps pdf