The FreeBSD NIS(YP) HOWTO : Glossary and General Information : Glossary of Terms
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2.1. Glossary of TermsNIS!glossary YP!glossary NIS+!glossary glossary!NIS/YP/NIS+

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

DB

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.

domainname

A name "key" that is used by NIS clients to be able to locate a suitable NIS server that serves that domainname key. Please note that this does not necessarily have anything at all to do with the DNS "domain" (machine name) of the machine(s).

FTP

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

libnsl

Name services library, a library of name service calls (getpwnam, getservbyname, etc...) on SVR4 Unixes.

libsocket

Socket services library, a library for the socket service calls (socket, bind, listen, etc...) on SVR4 Unixes.

NIS

Network Information Service, a service that provides information, that has to be known throughout the network, to all machines on the network. There is support for NIS in Linux's standard libc library, which in the following text is referred to as "traditional NIS".

NIS+

Network Information Service (Plus :-), essentially NIS on steroids. NIS+ is designed by Sun Microsystems Inc. as a replacement for NIS with better security and better handling of _large_ installations.

NSS

Name Service Switch. On Solaris, the /etc/nsswitch.conf file determines the order of lookups performed when a certain piece of information is requested.

RPC

Remote Procedure Call. RPC routines allow C programs to make procedure calls on other machines across the network. When people talk about RPC they most often mean the Sun RPC variant.

YP

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

TCP-IP

Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. It is the data communication protocol most often used on Unix machines.


The FreeBSD NIS(YP) HOWTO : Glossary and General Information : Glossary of Terms
Previous: Glossary and General Information
Next: Some General Information