Diskless Node

A diskless node (or diskless workstation) is a workstation or personal computer without disk drives, which employs network booting to load its operating system from a server. (A computer may also be said to act as a diskless node, if its disks are unused and network booting is used.) Diskless nodes (or computers acting as such) are sometimes known as network computers or hybrid clients. Hybrid client may either just mean diskless node, or it may be used in a more particular sense to mean...

Read More

Internet Protocol Suite

The Internet Protocol suite, usually referred to as "TCP/IP," is a full set of internetworking protocols that operate in the network layer, the transport layer, and the application layer. While TCP/IP refers to two separate protocols called TCP and IP, Internet Protocol suite refers to the entire set of protocols developed by the Internet community. Still, most people just say "TCP/IP" when they are referring to the Internet Protocol suite. Figure I-8 illustrates how the protocols compare to...

Read More

Peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer (abbreviated to P2P) refers to a computer network in which each computer in the network can act as a client or server for the other computers in the network, allowing shared access to files and peripherals without the need for a central server. P2P networks can be set up in the home, a business or over the Internet. Each network type requires all computers in the network to use the same or a compatible program to connect to each other and access files and other resources found...

Read More

Client / Server Model

The client/server model is a computing model that acts as distributed application which partitions tasks or workloads between the providers of a resource or service, called servers, and service requesters, called clients. Often clients and servers communicate over a computer network on separate hardware, but both client and server may reside in the same system. A server machine is a host that is running one or more server programs which share their resources with clients. A client does not ...

Read More

Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) develops and promotes Internet standards, cooperating closely with the W3C and ISO/IEC standards bodies and dealing in particular with standards of the TCP/IP and Internet protocol suite. It is an open standards organization, with no formal membership or membership requirements. All participants and managers are volunteers, though their work is usually funded by their employers or sponsors; for instance, the current chairperson is funded by VeriSign...

Read More

Web Crawler

A Web crawler is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion. Other terms for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, Web spiders, Web robots, or—especially in the FOAF community—Web scutters. This process is called Web crawling or spidering. Many sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later...

Read More

Subnet Mask Tutorial

The subnet mask plays an important role in computer networking. It's used to determine the subnetwork an IP address belongs to. It achieves this by masking the part of the IP address that will be used to create the subnetworks and not masking the portion of the IP address that will be used for host addresses. Networks based on TCP/IP use subnet masking to split an IP address into two parts; the first part is used to divide the network into logical subnetworks, the second part is used...

Read More

The Importance Of Network Security

Since the rise in popularity of the Internet, we have started to use our computers for a much wider range of tasks than ever before. At home, we buy our groceries, do our banking, buy birthday presents, send communications via email, write our life story on social networking sites; at work, our businesses provide e-commerce via websites, staff send and recieve emails, phonecalls and video conferencing are done through the network using IP based servcices; all of this is done online and...

Read More

IP Address

An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label assigned to each device (e.g., computer, printer) participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing. Its role has been characterized as follows: "A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how to get there". The designers of the Internet Protocol...

Read More

Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

In computing, a uniform resource locator (URL) is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to an Internet resource. A URL is technically a type of uniform resource identifier (URI) but in many technical documents and verbal discussions URL is often used as a synonym for URI.   History   In computing, a uniform resource locator (URL) is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to an Internet resource. A URL is technically a type of uniform resource...

Read More

HyperText Markup Language (HTML)

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the main markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages. HTML is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of tags enclosed in angle brackets (like <html>), within the web page content. HTML tags most commonly come in pairs like <h1> and </h1>, although some tags, known as empty elements, are unpaired, for example <img>. The first tag in a pair is the start tag, the second tag is the end...

Read More

World Wide Web (WWW)

The World Wide Web (abbreviated as WWW or W3, and commonly known as the Web) is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia, and navigate between them via hyperlinks. Using concepts from his earlier hypertext systems like ENQUIRE, British engineer and computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, now Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), wrote a proposal in March...

Read More