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Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
Request for Comments: 7805
Obsoletes: 675 721 761 813 816 879 896
Updates: 7414
Category: Informational
ISSN: 2070-1721
A. Zimmermann
W. Eddy
1078 6013 MTI Systems
L. Eggert
NetApp
April 2016

Moving Outdated TCP Extensions and TCP-Related Documents

to Historic or Informational Status

Abstract

This document reclassifies several TCP extensions and TCP-related documents that either have been superseded, have never seen widespread use, or are no longer recommended for use to "Historic" status. The affected documents are RFCs 675, 721, 761, 813, 816, 879, 896, 1078, and 6013. Additionally, this document reclassifies RFCs 700, 794, 814, 817, 872, 889, 964, and 1071 to "Informational" status.

Status of This Memo

This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is published for informational purposes.

This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has received public review and has been approved for publication by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Not all documents approved by the IESG are a candidate for any level of Internet Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 5741.

Information about the current status of this document, any errata, and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7805.

Copyright Notice

Copyright © 2016 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.

This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  Status Changes  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
     2.1.  Moving to "Historic" Status . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
     2.2.  Moving to "Informational" Status  . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   3.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   4.  References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     4.1.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     4.2.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8

1. Introduction

TCP has a long history. Over time, many RFCs have accumulated that describe aspects of the TCP protocol, implementation, and extensions. Some of these have been superseded, are no longer recommended for use, or have simply never seen widespread use.

Sections 6 and 7.1 of the TCP roadmap document [RFC7414] already reclassified a number of TCP extensions as "Historic" and describes the reasons for doing so, but it did not instruct the RFC Editor to change the status of these RFCs in the RFC database. The purpose of this document is to do just that.

In addition, this document reclassifies all other documents mentioned in the TCP roadmap that currently have an "Unknown" status to either "Historic" or "Informational".

2. Status Changes

The following two sections give a short justification why a specific TCP extension or a TCP-related document is being reclassified as "Historic" or "Informational". In addition, the letter code after an RFC number indicates from which original status a particular RFC is changed to "Historic" or "Informational" (see BCP 9 [RFC2026] for an explanation of these categories):

S - Standards Track (Proposed Standard, Draft Standard, or Internet Standard) 

      E - Experimental
      
      I - Informational
      
      H - Historic

B - Best Current Practice

U - Unknown (not formally defined)

For the content of the documents itself, the reader is referred either to the corresponding RFC or, for a brief description, to the TCP roadmap document [RFC7414].

2.1. Moving to "Historic" Status

This document changes the status of the following RFCs to "Historic" [RFC2026]: 

   o  [RFC675]  U, "Specification of Internet Transmission Control
      Program" was replaced by the final TCP specification [RFC793]
   
   o  [RFC721]  U, "Out-of-Band Control Signals in a Host-to-Host
      Protocol" was a proposal that was not incorporated into the final
      TCP specification [RFC793]
   
   o  [RFC761]  U, "DoD Standard Transmission Control Protocol" was
      replaced by the final TCP specification [RFC793]
   
   o  [RFC813]  U, "Window and Acknowledgement Strategy in TCP" was
      incorporated into [RFC1122]
   
   o  [RFC816]  U, "Fault Isolation and Recovery" was incorporated into
      [RFC1122] and [RFC5461]
   
   o  [RFC879]  U, "The TCP Maximum Segment Size and Related Topics" was
      incorporated into [RFC1122] and [RFC6691]
   
   o  [RFC896]  U, "Congestion Control in IP/TCP Internetworks" was
      incorporated into [RFC1122] and [RFC6633]
   
   o  [RFC1078] U, "TCP Port Service Multiplexer (TCPMUX)" should be
      deprecated, because:
   
      *  It modifies the TCP connection establishment semantics by also
         completing the three-way handshake when a service is not
         available.
      *  It requires all new connections to be received on a single
         port, which limits the number of connections between two
         machines.
      *  It complicates firewall implementation and management because
         all services share the same port number.
      *  There are very limited deployments, and these are not used in
         an Internet context.  (The only reported use is for SGI's Data
         Migration Facility in private networks.)
   
   o  [RFC6013] E, "TCP Cookie Transactions (TCPCT)" should be
      deprecated (although only published in 2011) because:
   
      *  It uses the experimental TCP option codepoints, which prohibit
         a large-scale deployment.
      *  [RFC7413] and [TCP-EDO] are alternatives that have more "rough
         consensus and running code" behind them.
      *  There are no known wide-scale deployments.

2.2. Moving to "Informational" Status

This document changes the status of the following RFCs to "Informational" [RFC2026]: 

   o  [RFC700] U, "A Protocol Experiment", which presents a field report
      about the deployment of a very early version of TCP
   
   o  [RFC794]  U, "Pre-emption", which recommends that operating
      systems need to manage their limited resources, which may include
      TCP connection state
   
   o  [RFC814]  U, "Name, Addresses, Ports, and Routes", which gives
      guidance on designing tables and algorithms to keep track of
      various identifiers within a TCP/IP implementation
   
   o  [RFC817]  U, "Modularity and Efficiency in Protocol
      Implementation", which contains general implementation suggestions
   
   o  [RFC872]  U, "TCP-on-a-LAN", which concludes that the fear of
      using TCP on a local network is unfounded
   
   o  [RFC889]  U, "Internet Delay Experiments", which describes
      experiments with the TCP retransmission timeout calculation
   
   o  [RFC964]  U, "Some Problems with the Specification of the Military
      Standard Transmission Control Protocol", which points out several
      specification bugs in the US Military's MIL-STD-1778 document,
      which was intended as a successor to [RFC793]
   
   o  [RFC1071] U, "Computing the Internet Checksum", which lists a
      number of implementation techniques for efficiently computing the
      Internet checksum

3. Security Considerations

This document introduces no new security considerations. Each RFC listed in this document attempts to address the security considerations of the specification it contains.

4. References

4.1. Normative References

   [RFC675]   Cerf, V., Dalal, Y., and C. Sunshine, "Specification of
              Internet Transmission Control Program", RFC 675,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC0675, December 1974,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc675>.
   
   [RFC700]   Mader, E., Plummer, W., and R. Tomlinson, "Protocol
              experiment", RFC 700, DOI 10.17487/RFC0700, August 1974,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc700>.
   
   [RFC721]   Garlick, L., "Out-of-Band Control Signals in a Host-to-
              Host Protocol", RFC 721, DOI 10.17487/RFC0721, September
              1976, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc721>.
   
   [RFC761]   Postel, J., "DoD standard Transmission Control Protocol",
              RFC 761, DOI 10.17487/RFC0761, January 1980,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc761>.
   
   [RFC794]   Cerf, V., "Pre-emption", RFC 794, DOI 10.17487/RFC0794,
              September 1981, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc794>.
   
   [RFC813]   Clark, D., "Window and Acknowledgement Strategy in TCP",
              RFC 813, DOI 10.17487/RFC0813, July 1982,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc813>.
   
   [RFC814]   Clark, D., "Name, addresses, ports, and routes", RFC 814,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC0814, July 1982,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc814>.
   
   [RFC816]   Clark, D., "Fault isolation and recovery", RFC 816,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC0816, July 1982,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc816>.
   
   [RFC817]   Clark, D., "Modularity and efficiency in protocol
              implementation", RFC 817, DOI 10.17487/RFC0817, July 1982,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc817>.
   
   [RFC872]   Padlipsky, M., "TCP-on-a-LAN", RFC 872,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC0872, September 1982,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc872>.
   
   [RFC879]   Postel, J., "The TCP Maximum Segment Size and Related
              Topics", RFC 879, DOI 10.17487/RFC0879, November 1983,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc879>.
   
   [RFC889]   Mills, D., "Internet Delay Experiments", RFC 889,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC0889, December 1983,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc889>.
   
   [RFC896]   Nagle, J., "Congestion Control in IP/TCP Internetworks",
              RFC 896, DOI 10.17487/RFC0896, January 1984,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc896>.
   
   [RFC964]   Sidhu, D. and T. Blumer, "Some problems with the
              specification of the Military Standard Transmission
              Control Protocol", RFC 964, DOI 10.17487/RFC0964, November
              1985, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc964>.
   
   [RFC1071]  Braden, R., Borman, D., and C. Partridge, "Computing the
              Internet checksum", RFC 1071, DOI 10.17487/RFC1071,
              September 1988, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1071>.
   
   [RFC1078]  Lottor, M., "TCP port service Multiplexer (TCPMUX)",
              RFC 1078, DOI 10.17487/RFC1078, November 1988,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1078>.
   
   [RFC6013]  Simpson, W., "TCP Cookie Transactions (TCPCT)", RFC 6013,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC6013, January 2011,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6013>.

4.2. Informative References

   [RFC793]   Postel, J., "Transmission Control Protocol", STD 7,
              RFC 793, DOI 10.17487/RFC0793, September 1981,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc793>.
   
   [RFC1122]  Braden, R., Ed., "Requirements for Internet Hosts -
              Communication Layers", STD 3, RFC 1122,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC1122, October 1989,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1122>.
   
   [RFC2026]  Bradner, S., "The Internet Standards Process -- Revision
              3", BCP 9, RFC 2026, DOI 10.17487/RFC2026, October 1996,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2026>.
   
   [RFC5461]  Gont, F., "TCP's Reaction to Soft Errors", RFC 5461,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC5461, February 2009,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5461>.
   
   [RFC6633]  Gont, F., "Deprecation of ICMP Source Quench Messages",
              RFC 6633, DOI 10.17487/RFC6633, May 2012,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6633>.
   
   [RFC6691]  Borman, D., "TCP Options and Maximum Segment Size (MSS)",
              RFC 6691, DOI 10.17487/RFC6691, July 2012,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6691>.
   
   [RFC7413]  Cheng, Y., Chu, J., Radhakrishnan, S., and A. Jain, "TCP
              Fast Open", RFC 7413, DOI 10.17487/RFC7413, December 2014,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7413>.
   
   [RFC7414]  Duke, M., Braden, R., Eddy, W., Blanton, E., and A.
              Zimmermann, "A Roadmap for Transmission Control Protocol
              (TCP) Specification Documents", RFC 7414,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC7414, February 2015,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7414>.
   
   [TCP-EDO]  Touch, J. and W. Eddy, "TCP Extended Data Offset Option",
              Work in Progress, draft-ietf-tcpm-tcp-edo-04, November
              2015.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank John Leslie, Pasi Sarolahti, Richard Scheffenegger, Martin Stiemerling, Joe Touch, Valdis Kletnieks, and Greg Skinner for their contributions.

Lars Eggert has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program 2014-2018 under grant agreement No. 644866 (SSICLOPS). This document reflects only the authors' views, and the European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

Authors' Addresses

   Alexander Zimmermann
   
   Email: alexander@zimmermann.eu.com
   
   Wesley M. Eddy
   MTI Systems
   Suite 170, 18013 Cleveland Parkway
   Cleveland, OH  44135
   United States
   
   Phone: +1-216-433-6682
   Email: wes@mti-systems.com
   
   Lars Eggert
   NetApp
   Sonnenallee 1
   Kirchheim  85551
   Germany
   
   Phone: +49 151 12055791
   Email: lars@netapp.com