Glossary s

A person who sells a company's products or services, with focus on the engineering or technical aspects of the sale.

The process by which an application gives TCP some data, with TCP breaking the data into smaller pieces, called segments, for transmission into a network.

A value in the TCP header that is used to number the packets, for the purpose of noticing lost or in-error packets so that bad packets can be resent.

A type of physical interface that a router uses to connect to a WAN link.

A TCP/IP protocol, defined in RFC 2821, that defines the messages used to control the transfer of e-mail.

Another term for SMTP Server Software.

Software that implements the SMTP server features.

IBM's proprietary networking model.

Jargon referring to the postal service, which delivers paper letters in a matter of days, as compared to e-mail, which delivers e-mails in a matter of seconds.

A somewhat sarcastic term used to refer to the process of not using a computer network, but instead walking back and forth between computers with disks or CDs, moving files manually and requiring comfortable sneakers!

The trade name of a particular vendor's network analysis tool. (Sniffer is a trademark of the Network Associates Corporation.)

The 6-byte-long portion of an Ethernet header in which a NIC places its own Ethernet address before sending a frame.

A field in the IP header that lists the IP address of the sender of the packet.

A device that converts analog electrical signals into sounds.

A routing table entry that was created by having a network engineer configure a router with the routing information.

A type of cabling that holds twisted pairs of wires and for which extra shielding is added to the wires to reduce EM interference.

An Ethernet LAN cable for which the wire in pin 1 of the connector on one end of the cable connects to pin 1 on the other end of the cable; the wire in pin 2 on one connector is connected to pin 2; and so on.

An approach to running cables in a building that results in less clutter, fewer times to install a cable under the floor or inside the ceiling, and added convenience when installing new devices.

A subdivision of a Class A, B, or C network.

A dotted-decimal number that represents a single subnet. The subnet number has the same value as the subnet's individual hosts in the network and subnet parts of the number, and all binary 0s in the host part of the number.

The process of subdividing an IP network into multiple subnets.

Networking hardware and software that forwards the network traffic back and forth between the various devices on the network.

A physical socket on the side of a switch into which an Ethernet cable can be inserted.