Went through a couple of RFCs lately. (One of them again to review anything I might have missed).
RFC 2516 PPP over Ethernet
RFC 2279 UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646
The PPPoE one was just to make sure I am understanding PPPoE. TOo bad the protocol gives only the hint that you need ta-da… PPPoE servers / concentrators at the ISP end doing the authentication so PPPoE clients can access the Internet. But isn’t it great how we can take a broadcast network architecture and make it Point to Point again? Although from an ISP perspective makes perfect sense if you’re not willing to hand your customers
all you can slurp bandwidth.
The UTF-8 informational RFC was actually quite informative for me. As it explained how UTF-8 is actually variable encoded as bits. It uses a nifty encoding scheme in that if the high order bit is set (and any bits after that until a zero bit) then this marks how many bytes compose this UTF-8 character. For example 110xxxxx xxxxxxxx means 2 bytes (16 bits). If the higher order bit is NOT set you can just map it to ASCII mappings. Pretty funky.
