Glossary l

A term created just for this book to make an analogy to having a car be "street legal."

A networking device that forwards frames based on their destination address.

A subset of protocols of a single networking model. The protocols in the same layer have the same general or related goals.

A sarcastic term referring to business, political, or other nontechnical issues that might affect network design choices. It refers to a nonexistent OSI layer, just above the highest OSI layer.

With LAN switches, "learning" refers to the process of examining the source MAC address of frames that the switch received, and adding new entries to the MAC address table. The switch adds an entry listing the source MAC address of the frame, along with the port in which the frame was received.

A service from telephone companies that provides a communication path between a pair of sites.

A style of drawing a line so that it looks like a bolt of lightning. WAN links are often drawn with a lightning bolt line style in network diagrams.

Another name for 802.2.

A file on an individual computer that holds a list of host names and their corresponding IP addresses. A host computer can look at this local host file to perform name resolution.

A cable from the premises of a telephone subscriber to the telephone company CO.

On an Ethernet NIC, hardware that causes the electrical signal sent by the NIC to also be received on the NIC, without passing over the cable.