Operation Manual

108 KEN! – Glossary
for a wide variety of ISDN services including data transfer,
speech and fax transmission, video conferencing and tele-
phony.
Chat
A “conversation” conducted using the keyboard and monitor
screen. Messages, questions and responses are entered by
means of the keyboard; all participants in the discussion can
then respond. In addition to regular or permanently estab-
lished forums, there are also numerous “live chats" which
often occur just once on a certain topic.
DHCP
DHCP stands for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol. DHCP
is used to automatically assign the individual workstations
IP addresses from an address range. Other information such
as the name of the domain, the standard gateway and the
relevant DNS server can also be provided to the Clients.
For smooth operation in a TCP/IP network, all devices in a lo-
cal network require unambiguous IP addresses. They also
need the addresses of the DNS servers and of a standard
gateway through which data packets are to be routed from
addresses not locally accessible.
In a small network it is certainly possible to enter IP address-
es for each computer by hand. In larger networks with many
workstations, however, this quickly becomes a daunting
task.
DNS
Domain Name Service (DNS) is an address conversion ser-
vice responsible in TCP/IP networks like the Internet for the
conversion of the numerical version of an IP address to a leg-
ible text form. It converts the names of servers into a numeri-
cal address format.
Since assigning and registering numerical IP addresses can
be quite involved, non-coded text names are used to access
computers in the Internet, like “www.avm.de”, for instance.
But who knows what IP address is behind the address