The Complete April Fools' Day RFCs

Cover of The Complete April Fools' Day RFCs
COMPILERSThomas A. Limoncelli and
Peter H Salus
PAGES416 pages
TYPEPaperback
ISBN-10
ISBN-13		1-57398-042-0
978-1-57398-042-5
PUBLISHEDMarch 2007
PRICE$24.95 US
$27.50 CAN

TCP/IP over carrier pigeons?? Of course, RFC 1149.

Imagine the geek points you'll get when your friends see this on your coffee table or in your office. Mark your favorites. Read them aloud to your co-workers. Gawk at the ASCII drawings of pigeons and rubber chickens. This book collects them all under one cover in a book suitable for your coffee table or office (or, if you must, secreted away to hide your geeky sense of humor). It's also the perfect gift for the network administrator or computer scientist.

"The Complete April Fools' Day RFCs is a nigh-perfect geek reader for the top of your favorite nerd's toilet tank...engineer humor at its finest — geeks making up stuff to amuse other geeks" --- Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

The Complete April Fools' Day RFCs contains the most hilarious protocols ever transmitted! An all-in-one collection of the RFCs in their original ASCII graphic greatness, plus Forewords by Brad Templeton, Scott Bradner, and Mike O'Dell... not to mention the comments of the authors/compilers. And when your network goes down.. this book won't help you at all!

100% real RFCs published by the Internet Engineering Task Force, including gems such as:

exciting new protocols:

  • Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0) (RFC 2324)
  • IP over Avian Carriers with QoS (RFC 2549)

and extraordinary security techniques{

  • The NULL Encryption Algorithm (RFC 2410)
  • The Evil Bit (RFC 3514)

and elastic networking tools:

  • Debug networks with a rubber chicken (RFC 2321)
  • The 12 Networking Truths (RFC 1925)

Co-author Peter Salus describes the book thusly:

Netnerds aren't just funny to the public: they poke fun at themselves!

For over 35 years, the Requests for Comment have been the guidelines and standards of the Internet. But squirreled away within the over-4000 RFCs are a number of mock items, generally (not always) issued on April Fools' Day.

Now, for the first time, you can buy all the April Fools RFCs -- together with commentaries by Tom and I -- and find out how to distinguish good stuff from malware; how to use pigeons as packet carriers; how the Roman addressing system works; and many other good ideas as well.

As a bonus, we've added the verse RFCs and ... well, find out for yourself.

This is the perfect gift for any who deals with the Internet -- from Al Gore on down to the everyday bit-monkey.

About the Compilers

Thomas A. Limoncelli is an internationally recognized author and speaker on many topics including system administration, time management, and grass-roots organizing. A sys-tem administrator since 1988, he has worked for small and large companies including Google, Cibernet, Lumeta, AT&T, Lucent / Bell Labs. He has written three books: two editions of The Practice of System and Network Administration from Addison- Wesley (2001, 2007) and Time Management for System Administrators from O’Reilly (2005). He shared SAGE’s Outstanding Achievement Award in 2005. He holds a B.A. in C.S. from Drew University, Madison, New Jersey, USA. His web site and blog is http://www.EverythingSysadmin.com .

Dr. Peter H. Salus talks too much and writes too much. He is a frequent speaker at computer events in the US, Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Russia, Australia, Finland, Denmark, Brazil, Chile, and the Czech Republic. He has appeared on the BBC, the Discovery Channel, PBS, PCTV, and the Dr. Dobbs webcast as computing and networking historian. Dr. Salus has written or edited over a dozen books, including The ARPANET Sourcebook: The Unpublished Foundations of the Internet (due June 2007), A Quarter Century of UNIX, Casting the Net: From ARPANET to INTERNET and Beyond, the four-volume Handbook of Programming Languages, and The Big Book of IPv6 Addressing RFCs.