It Has to Work
From time immemorial, humor has served to capture truth. This is no different in the world of computer networks. A notable example of using humor to capture truth is the April 1 RFC series published by the IETF. RFC1925, The Twelve Networking Truths, will serve as our guide.
According to RFC1925, the first fundamental truth of networking is: it has to work. While this might seem to be overly simplistic, it has proven—over the years—to be much more difficult to implement in real life than it looks like in a slide deck. Those with extensive experience with failures, however, can often make a better guess at what is possible to make work than those without such experience. The good news, however, is the experience of failure can be shared, especially through self-deprecating humor.
Consider RFC748, which is the first April First RFC published by the IETF, the TELNET RANDOMLY-LOSE Option. This RFC describes a set of additional signals in the TELNET protocol (for those too young to remember, TELNET is what people used to communicate with hosts before SSH and web browsers!) that instruct the server not to provide random losses through such things as “system crashes, lost data, Continue reading
