Welcome to the Novell Developer Technical Glossary. Here you will find a collection of technical terms that pop up on our wiki from time to time and place to place.
Many of these technical terms are defined in man pages. We recommend that you refer the details of the definitions of these types of terms to the online man pages at linuxmanpages.com where possible.
Many other technical terms refer to network protocol specifications. We recommend that you refer the details of the definitions of these terms to online RFC documents. (See Help:How To Look Up RFCs for details on locating the correct RFC.)
"[The Common Information Model] provides a common definition of management information for systems, networks, applications and services, and allows for vendor extensionsâ? (Source). CIM is a vendor-agnostic industry management standard.
A CIMOM is a CIM Object Manager â an application that manages objects according to the CIM standard.
From their website, âthe Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTF) is the industry organization leading the development of management standards and integration technology for enterprise and Internet environmentsâ? (Source).
FHS stands for Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, which defines the basic layout of Linux filesystems and proposes a standard for file and directory placement. For details refer to the complete standard.
A filesystem on Linux is a low-level application, usually a kernel module, which manages the storage of files on a disk and the accessibility of those files by applications.
HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol and is one of the fundamental protocols used on the Internet to serve web pages and web content. Wikipedia provides a good description of HTTP, or you can refer to RFC 2616.
IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. IMAP is a protocol commonly used by mail readers to fetch mail messages over a network and present them in a client. Refer to RFC 3501 for the complete specification.
Man is short for manual, and refers to the text-based manual pages available on Linux. Most mature applications should include man pages that describe how they are to be used; many technical users will expect man pages. Refer to [1] for details on man pages.
MOF stands for âManaged Object Formatâ? and defines a way of representing an object model in text such that it can be loaded and used by a CIMOM.
NCP stands for NetWare Core Protocol and is a protocol commonly used by NetWare servers and clients to make network filesystems available.
NFS stands for Networked File System. Refer to RFC 1813 and RFC 3530 for details.
NNTP stands for Network News Transfer Protocol. NNTP is commonly used to implement newsgroups and forums. Refer to RFC 977 for the complete specification.
From their website, âOpenWBEM is an enterprise-grade open-source implementation of WBEM, written in C++, suitable for commercial and non-commercial applicationsâ? (Source). An open-source CIMOM written in C++, OpenWBEM is the CIMOM used by Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and Novell Open Enterprise Server.
PAM stands for âPluggable Authentication Modules.â? PAM is a Linux-based infrastructure that other applications can use to take care of authentication tasks. An application can choose to allow PAM to take care of authentication issues instead of dealing with those issues in the application itself.
POP stands for Post Office Protocol. POP is commonly used by mail clients to retrieve mail messages over a network. Refer to RFC 1939 for the complete specification.
SMB stands for Symmetric Message Block. This is a network filesystem mechanism used by Microsoft networks commonly, and is now widely used on Linux as well. Samba is a very popular Linux implementation of SMB.
SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. This protocol is commonly used to transfer e-mail messages from server to server. Refer to RFC 2821 for the complete specification.
Syslog is the general name for the logging facility on Linux. An application can invoke one of several syslog commands that will cause a log message to be written, as provided to the command. The message will be written to the correct logging location for that application, as defined by the syslog configuration. This location can be remote as well as local. The syslog commands make calls into the syslog daemon, which runs automatically at system startup, and routes the messages as defined in the configuration.
TLS stands for Transport Layer Security, a protocol for providing security in network communications. Refer to RFC 2246 and RFC 3546 for complete details.
âWeb-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) is a set of management and Internet standard technologies developed to unify the management of enterprise computing environmentsâ? (Source).
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