Specifications

6381-A4 Router Users Guide 128
LAN Local Area Network.
A network limited to a small geographic area, such as a home or small
office.
LED Light Emitting Diode
An electronic light-emitting device. The indicator lights on the front of the
device are LEDs.
MAC address Media Access Control address
The permanent hardware address of a device, assigned by its
manufacturer. MAC addresses are expressed as six pairs of hex
characters, with each pair separated by colons. For example;
NN:NN:NN:NN:NN:NN.
Mask See network mask.
Mbps Abbreviation for Megabits per second, or one million bits per second.
Network data rates are often expressed in Mbps.
NAT Network Address Translation
A service performed by many routers that translates your network’s
publicly known IP address into a private IP address for each computer on
your LAN. Only your router and your LAN know these addresses; the
outside world sees only the public IP address when talking to a computer
on your LAN.
Network A group of computers that are connected together, allowing them to
communicate with each other and share resources, such as software,
files, etc. A network can be small, such as a LAN, or very large, such as
the Internet.
Network keys (Also known as encryption keys.) 64-bit and 128-bit encryption keys used
in WEP wireless security schemes. The keys encrypt data over the
WLAN, and only wireless PCs configured with WEP keys that correspond
to the keys configured on the device can send/receive encrypted data.
Network mask A network mask is a sequence of bits applied to an IP address to select
the network ID while ignoring the host ID. Bits set to 1 mean “select this
bit” while bits set to 0 mean “ignore this bit.” For example, if the network
mask 255.255.255.0 is applied to the IP address 100.10.50.1, the network
ID is 100.10.50, and the host ID is 1. See binary, IP address, subnet.
NIC Network Interface Card
An adapter card that plugs into your computer and provides the physical
interface to your network cabling. For Ethernet NICs this is typically an
RJ-45 connector. See Ethernet, RJ-45.
Packet Data transmitted on a network consists of units called packets. Each
packet contains a payload (the data), plus overhead information such as
where it came from (source address) and where it should go (destination
address).
Ping Packet Internet (or Inter-Network) Groper
A program used to verify whether the host associated with an IP address
is online. It can also be used to reveal the IP address for a given domain
name.
Port A physical access point to a device such as a computer or router, through
which data flows into and out of the device.