FOSS Network Infrastructure and Security/Glossary
FOSS Network Infrastructure and Security
Foreword — List of Abbreviations — Introduction to FOSS and GNU/Linux — Network Concepts and Architectures — Major Networking Functions with FOSS — Security Functions with FOSS — Network Planning — Further References — Glossary — About the Author — Acknowledgements — About APDIP — About IOSN
Client | A client is a computer on the network which uses the server to get resources which may be e-mails, documents, or other forms of data. |
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Deamon | In UNIX and GNU/Linux, daemons are server software that constantly run on top of the operating system. |
Host | Any device connected to the Internet or a TCP/IP network is referred to as the host. |
IEFT | The Internet Engineering Task Force is the Internet standards making organization. IETF publishes the RFC series documents as Internet standards. See http://www.ietf.org. |
Internet | The Internet is commonly referred to as the ‘networks of networks’. In technical terms, the Internet is the global network of computers that are able to communicate in TCP/IP with each other. |
Intranet | A private network, which operates on the same principles as the Internet, is called Intranet. Intranets also use the TCP/IP protocol. |
Localhost | Computers with TCP/IP installed refer to their loopback interface as the local host. This is defined by default in the DNS software. |
Loopback | Loopback is a virtual interface defined in all TCP/IP computers. This virtual interface is assigned the IP address 127.0.0.1 and is required for TCP/IP to work properly. |
PoP | Point of Presence – an Internet service provider’s branch office. This should not be confused with POP3, which is an e-mail protocol and stands for Post Office Protocol. |
Port | The points of contacts with any TCP/IP host. TCP/IP computers with IP addresses have ports ranging from 1 to 65336, which act as points of contact for different services running on that computer. For example, the SMTP protocol uses port 25, HTTP uses port 80, and so on. |
RFC | Request for Comments is the series of documentation for Internet standards documents. |
Server | A server is a powerful computer that serves resources to other computers on the network. The server can also be a big storage space as well as a database. The key here is the special software that enables the hardware to provide services. |
SSL | Secure Sockets Layer is a secure communications layer that makes it possible to use the Web for e-commerce transactions. It makes sure that all communications between a client and server is encrypted. |
VLAN | A virtual LAN is a feature provided by many Ethernet switches, to allow the creation of multiple logical networks over the same physical connections. A single switch with three VLANs behaves the same way as three different physical switches. |
VPN | Virtual Private Networks are encrypted private networks which are running on top of the public network like the Internet. |