Cyclades ACS48 Network Hardware User Manual


 
Glossary
146 AlterPath Console Server User Manual
LDAP is a "lightweight" (smaller amount of code) version of
DAP (Directory Access Protocol), which is part of X.500, a
standard for directory services in a network.
MAC Medium Access Control. Internationally unique hardware
identification address that is assigned to the NIC (Network
Interface Card) which interfaces the node to the LAN.
Masquerading Where a system acts on behalf of other systems, such as when
an ISP server accesses network services on behalf of a dial-up
user.
MTU Short for 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. On Windows, you can set the MTU of
your machine. This defines the maximum size of the packets
sent from your computer onto the network. 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.
Trial and error is the only sure way of finding the optimal
MTU, but there are some guidelines that can help. For
example, the MTU of many PPP connections is 576, so if you
connect to the Internet via PPP, you might want to set your
machine's MTU to 576 too. Most Ethernet networks, on the
other hand, have an MTU of 1500.
Network Mask A 32-bit number used to group IP addresses together or to
indicate the range of IP addresses on a single IP network/
subnet/supernet. There is a group of addresses assigned to
each network segment. For example, the mask 255.255.255.0
groups together 254 IP addresses. If we have, as another