User's Manual

Wireless Array
498 Glossary of Terms
host name
The unique name that identifies a computer on a network. On the Internet,
the host name is in the form comp.xyz.net. If there is only one Internet site
the host name is the same as the domain name. One computer can have more than
one host name if it hosts more than one Internet site (for example, home.xyz.net
and comp.xyz.net). In this case, comp and home are the host names and xyz.net is
the domain name.
IPsec
A Layer 3 authentication and encryption protocol. Used to secure VPNs.
MAC address
(Media Access Control Address) A 6-byte hexadecimal address assigned by a
manufacturer to a device.
Mbps
(Megabits per second) A standard measure for data transmission speeds (for
example, the rate at which information travels over the Internet). 1 Mbps denotes
one million bits per second.
MTU
(Maximum Transmission Unit) The largest physical packet size — measured in
bytes — that a network can transmit. Any messages larger than the MTU are
divided into smaller packets before being sent. Every network has a different
MTU, which is set by the network administrator. Ideally, you want the MTU to be
the same as the smallest MTU of all the networks between your machine and
a message's final destination. Otherwise, if your messages are larger than one of
the intervening MTUs, they will get broken up (fragmented), which slows down
transmission speeds.
NTP
(Network Time Protocol) An Internet standard protocol (built on top of TCP/IP)
that ensures the accurate synchronization (to the millisecond) of computer clock
times in a network of computers. Running as a continuous background client
program on a computer, NTP sends periodic time requests to servers, obtaining
server time stamps and using them to adjust the client's clock.