Overview

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) publishes a series of documents called Requests for Comments (RFC) that represent a sort of collective consciousness for the Internet community. These documents may also belong to other sets of documents such as the Internet standards (STD) series, the For Your Information (FYI) series, or the Best Current Practices (BCP) series. An RFC may contain a specification that is on the Standards track, meaning the protocol or mechanism described therein is intended for general standardized use and with a goal to someday attaining Standard status. Other RFCs may be Informational, describing something of interest to the Internet community but not necessarily a standard; still other RFCs may be designated Experimental, meaning they document work being done by cutting-edge researchers that is not currently intended for general use. And as RFCs become obsolete or irrelevant, they are relegated to Historic status.

This book includes the most important and relevant RFCs about Internet file transfer protocols. Some are on the Standards track, others may be Experimental or Informational. However, they all define Internet file transfer protocols, how they work, and how they are used both on and off the Internet.

After figuring out how to run terminal sessions with remote computers (with Telnet), early Internet researchers needed to build a mechanism for transferring files. The result was the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), and some relatives such as the Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) and the Simple File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). FTP and TFTP still have...