Josh References Glossary N

NAP
See Network Access Point (NAP).

NAS
See Network Attached Storage (NAS).

NASD
See Network Attached Storage Device (NASD).

National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is a high-performance computing and communications facility and research center designed to serve the U.S. computational science and engineering community.

NCSA
See National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

NDMP
See Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP).

negative caching
Some DNS servers keep the answer "no such host or domain" cached to minimize response time to the resolver.

NetInfo
A hierarchical collection of databases used by NEXTSTEP computers for maintaining administrative information such as user accounts, host entries, printer information, and file system mounting data. The hierarchy consists of domains, or levels.

netnews
See USENET news.

network
A group of machines that share information and resources. A group of smaller networks or subnetworks. See also internet, Local Area Network (LAN), subnet, Wide Area Network (WAN).

Network Access Point (NAP)
Telecommunications term for the location where a call (data or voice) enters the telecommunications network.

network address
An IP address represented by a four-byte field written as byte1.byte2.byte3.byte4, where each byte is an ASCII numeric representation (0 through 255). See also host, Internet, network, subnet.

network administrator
See system administrator.

Network Attached Storage (NAS)
Storage (usually disks but possibly tapes or memory) attached to and distributed (shared) over a network. Usually the environment of a NAS is many computers sharing a lot of data; the typical bottleneck in performance is the file manager or object store. A common example is NFS over a LAN.

Network Attached Storage Device (NAS)
Developed at CMU, a more intelligent peripheral (disk or tape drive) that does its own file management. The drives enforce (but do not define) a security policy. Clients have an NFS-like interface and access model.

Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP)
An open protocol for network-based backup of data.

Network File System (NFS)
Allows file systems from one machine to be shared transparently across a network by other machines. Originally defined in RFC 1094 (v2) and RFC 1813 (v2).

Network Information Center (NIC)
The Internet's Network Information Center is responsible for controlling domain names across the entire Internet.

Network Information Service (NIS)
Formerly known as Yellow Pages (YP). A service used for the administration of network-wide databases within a specified domain. The databases, called maps, are provided by servers (master servers which control the domain and are client-writable for changes, and/or slave servers which are client-read-only) to participating hosts (clients) within a specified domain.

Network Monitoring System (NMS)
An application to notify front-line support personnel about problems with applications running on remote machines (such as the trading floor machines).

Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP)
A client/server protocol for exchanging and reading USENET news articles.

Network Time Protocol (NTP)
A protocol for synchronizing the clocks on all the hosts on a network or subnet to that of a single master time-keeper. Defined in RFC 1119 (v2) and RFC 1305 (v3).

Network-to-Network Interface (NNI)
The connection on telecommunications equipment between two disparate telecommunications networks.

news
See USENET news.

NeXTMail
The application for reading and sending mail on NeXT computers. Can include attachments in messages using drag-and-drop. See also attachment, Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME), mail.

NFS
See Network File System (NFS).

NIC
See Network Information Center (NIC).

NIS
See Network Information Service (NIS).

NIS+
An extension to the Network Information Service (NIS) including hierarchical domains, incremental updates to other servers, multiple indices to database tables, and built-in security. Requires the Solaris operating system.

NLSP
See Novell Link State Protocol (NLSP).

NMS
See Network Monitoring System (NMS).

Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP)
A client/server protocol for exchanging and reading USENET news articles.

Network Time Protocol (NTP)
A protocol for synchronizing the clocks on all the hosts on a network or subnet to that of a single master time-keeper.

NNI
See Network-to-Network Interface (NNI).

NNTP
See Network News Transfer Protocol(NNTP).

notice
A message concerning some operation or change in the distributed system.

Novell Link State Protocol (NLSP)
The equivalent of Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) for IPX RIP and SAP services. Much more efficient in its use of bandwidth and improved stability.

NS record
See DNS record types, NS record.

NTFS
See Windows NT File System (NTFS).

NTP
See Network Time Protocol (NTP).