RFC 118 (rfc118) - Page 1 of 2

Recommendations for facility documentation

Network Working Group                                     Richard Watson
Request for Comments: 118              Stanford Research Institute (ARC)
NIC: 5830                                                  16 April 1971

                RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FACILITY DOCUMENTATION


INFORMATION REQUIRED FOR EACH SERVICE AVAILABLE TO THE NETWORK

   There are two classes of information which a site needs to provide
   for each service or process it makes available over the Network:

      i) information required by system programmers in order to
      establish a connection to the facility

      ii) information required by a user to gain access to and use the
      facility

   The above two basic kinds of information which need to be in each
   facility description will comprise a "functional document" (see RFC
   115, NIC (5822,) for a description of functional documents and
   recommended procedures for updating them).

   The information required by user site system programmers may be a
   detailed document or a reference to a document containing a protocol
   common to several facilities or some combination of the above.  All
   information required such as connection socket numbers, message
   formats, and character set information must be included.  Two
   examples of system programmer type information are RFC 74, NIC
   (5417,) and RFC 105, NIC (5775,) prepared by James White of UCSB.


   The information required by user site users is of three types:

      a) information unique to Network users of the facility

      b) information in common between Network users and server site
      users of the facility

      c) information unique to particular Network user site.

   The information of type c) would be prepared by the user site from
   the information provided by the server site.  An example might be
   keying conventions required in order to send certain codes to the
   server site.






Watson