Baik engineer dan lawyer memang punya law, rule, dan semacamnya. Tapi
engineer jelas bukan lawyer. Di tengah-tengah
hukum-hukum dan panduan-panduan yang ditulis engineer, selalu ada
kreativitas khas yang selalu bikin hidup lebih
hidup.

Yang di bawah ini adalah isi dari RFC-1925. Buat yang belum tahu, RFC itu
sekumpulan hukum dan panduan resmi untuk
konfigurasi dan implementasi Internet. Membuat RFC bukanlah soal mudah. Ada
proses panjang dari pengajuan draft awal,
diskusi dan konfirmasi, pengajuan draft resmi, sidang, editing, sampai
pemberian nomor.

RFC-1925 berjudul The Twelve Networking Truths, diundangkan tanggal
1 April 1996. Tapi percayalah: isinya
bukan April Mob.

The Twelve Networking Truths

  1. It Has To Work.
  2. No matter how hard you push and no matter what the priority,
    you can’t increase the speed of light.

  3. With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is
    not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they
    are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them
    as they fly overhead.

  4. Some things in life can never be fully appreciated nor
    understood unless experienced firsthand. Some things in
    networking can never be fully understood by someone who neither
    builds commercial networking equipment nor runs an operational
    network.

  5. It is always possible to aglutenate multiple separate problems
    into a single complex interdependent solution. In most cases
    this is a bad idea.

  6. It is easier to move a problem around (for example, by moving
    the problem to a different part of the overall network
    architecture) than it is to solve it.

  7. It is always something
  8. It is more complicated than you think.
  9. For all resources, whatever it is, you need more.
  10. One size never fits all.
  11. Every old idea will be proposed again with a different name and
    a different presentation, regardless of whether it works.

  12. In protocol design, perfection has been reached not when there
    is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take
    away.