Glossary of Terms

# 1 Glossary of Terms

Contents of this section

In this document a lot of acronyms are used. Here are the most important acronyms and a brief explanation:

DBM

  DataBase Management, a library of functions which maintain key-content pairs in a data base.

DLL

  Dynamically Linked Library, a library linked to an executable program at run-time.

FTP

  File Transfer Protocol, a protocol used to transfer files between two computers.

NIS

  Network Information Service, a service that provides information, that has to be known throughout the network, to all machines on the network.

nsl

  network services library, a library of network service calls (socket, bind, etc...) on SYSV Unixes.

NYS

  This is a mutation of the word NIS and represents the NIS+ services library written by Peter Eriksson (pen@lysator.liu.se).

RPC

  Remote Procedure Call. RPC routines allow C programs to make procedure calls on other machines across the network.

YP

  Yellow Pages(tm), a registered trademark in the UK of British Telecom plc.

TCP-IP

  Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. It's a data communication protocol often used on Unix machines.

## 1.1 Some General Information

The next three lines are quoted from the Sun(tm) System & Network Administration Manual:

> `

>         "NIS was formerly known as Sun Yellow Pages (YP) but
>          the name Yellow Pages(tm) is a registered trademark
>          in the United Kingdom of British Telecom plc and may
>          not be used without permission."

> `

NIS stands for Network Information Service. It's purpose is to provide information, that has to be known throughout the network, to all machines on the network. Information likely to be distributed by NIS is:

- login names/passwords/home directories (/etc/passwd)
- group information (/etc/group)

So, for example, if your password entry is recorded in the NIS passwd database, you will be able to login on all machines on the net which have the NIS client programs running.

Sun is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. licensed to SunSoft, Inc.

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