Everything Sysadmin

Happy April Fools Day

My apology to Rob Glenn and Stephen Kent

The Complete April Fools RFCs (edited by myself and Peter H. Salus) includes one RFC that, it turns out, was not a joke. The book reprints all the April Fools and various "funny" RFCs and includes commentary not available online. And, err, umm... we recently learned that it includes on RFC that was not meant to be funny at all. We apologize if this has created any confusion.

RFC 2410: The NULL Encryption Algorithm and Its Use With IPsec by Rob Glenn and Stephen Kent, it turns out, is an actual part of the IPSec standard. (Thanks to Merike Kaeo for reporting this to us.) If you want to use IPSec to encode your packets without any of that messy "encryption" getting in the way of reading the payload, I'm sure RFC2410 is a great technique.

The first clue that this RFC was real was that it wasn't published on April 1st like other funny RFCs. However, in our defense, neither was RFC 527: ARPAWOCKY or other documents we reprinted in Part III: Poetry in Motion.

Ironically we had thought of picking a random non-funny RFC and publishing just to see if anyone noticed. Originally all RFCs were published on the first of the month, so many many many RFCs were published on April 1st of each year. Sorting through all of them to find which were fake was a difficult task. The RPC mechanism that resulted in NFS have so little security was published on April 1st. Was it a joke all along? That would explain a lot.

The book, with unpublished commentary from some big names in the history of the Internet, can be purchased from booksellers such as Amazon.com. More information on www.rfc-humor.com

--Tom Limoncelli

Are you ready for April Fools Day?

April Fools Day is only 2 weeks away. I've seen some well-executed pranks played at work, and some that ended up in people getting fired.

The times people got fired often involved violating corporate policies, such as forging email from important people. I once saw a person forge email from a manager... oh, I won't finish the story, that's enough of a "no no" at most companies. Of course, if they had warned the manager he could have been involved and it would have been even funnier.

We once convinced a manager to email out a new data storage policy: Since the voice mail system deletes messages that are more than 10 days old, why not do something similar on our NFS servers? Certainly a file that hasn't been used in 10 weeks can't be too important. Imagine how convenient it will be to have your home directory automatically cleaned this way? Most everyone thought it was funny, except one person that was very embarrassed when he took his complaint to the VP, who had a much better sense of humor.

The RFC documents that define how the internet works includes many fake documents that are hilarious. www.rfc-humor lists them all. This includes the famous RFC for how to send TCP/IP packets over carrier pigeon.

Peter H. Salus and I compiled all the funny RFCs and put them into a book. Why sell something that you can get for free online? Well, first of all we added commentary, some of which is written by famous industry folks. Secondly, it's nice to have all the RFCs in one place. It looks great on a coffee table or in your office. (Oh, and you get to see the brilliant cover design that I did.)

You can still order it in time for April 1st. Makes a perfect give for the geek that has everything. Order today!