What you should know about the Internet Standards process. - Page 5

Finding RFCs

The IETF publication mechanism does not provide the best interface or search engine for locating RFCs. However, it should be considered canonical. This list is not comprehensive, as there are probably scores if not hundreds of websites and FTP servers serving some or all RFCs. However, these are good places to go to when you need to locate a particular RFC or to find out more about what might be in an RFC or I-D.

• Internet Standards Archive. This is a good easy site, and they've got good search facilities for RFCs and I-Ds. A good "go-to" site for RFCs.
• Lynn Wheeler's RFC Index. This is another excellent resource if you're trying to figure out what's current, what is a standard, and what is not.
• The NORMOS Standards Repository. Another good site, it has particularly good search capabilities; very flexible. It also returns all the hits (unlike the Internet Standards Archive above).
• Invisible Worlds RFC Land. This seems to be a pretty cool site. Carl Malamud and others had a neat idea about XML-tagging RFCs. There's a lot of graphics and very involved programming underneath the website, so I'd like it better if it were simpler without all that stuff, and they still need to finish the XML-ification (at least, that's how it seems), but this site is recommended as well.
• The RFC Editor Page. This is the official place, and there's lots of good information here as well.
• The RFC Editor's Search through the RFC Database Page. This used to be nothing more than a simple listing, but has become virtually overnight one of the best resources on the web for RFCs. It is canonical, and you can download the whole RFC database from here too.

Pete Loshin (pete@loshin.com) began using the Internet as a TCP/IP networking engineer in 1988, and began writing about it in 1994. He runs the website Internet-Standard.com where you can find out more about Internet standards.