Acer 700 Series Appendix B Glossary

AcerRouter 700 User Guide B-1

BRouters

Appendix B Glossary

This section provides some common networking terms you may find in this user

guide.

Address Resolution Protocol table, a cache table that contains MAC address to IP

address mapping information. To send an IP packet to another device on the same

LAN, the source device has to acquire the MAC address of the destination device

first. If such information is already maintained in the ARP cache, the corresponding

MAC address will be used to transmit the data packet. Otherwise, the data will be

queued up first, and an ARP broadcast packet sent out to the LAN, and the destination

is expected to respond with the IP-to-MAC mapping. When the response is received,

the data that was previously queued up will be transmitted, and the mapping

information stored into the ARP cache table for re-use later.

Authentication is often used together with encryption, and can be enabled or disabled

on a per serial interface basis. It is like a password used by both ends of a serial

interface to tell the other side who it is, and to make sure that the other end is who it

claims to be. Once this feature is enabled, every packet will contain the encrypted

authentication key, and any packet that fails the authentication will be dropped.

A router that will forward bootp requests to bootp servers that do not reside in the

same network (the router can also be called a bootp proxy server for that reason). A

router can be configured as a bootp relay agent, with up to 5 bootp servers configured.

Whenever a bootp request is received by the router, the packet will be sent to each of

the bootp servers.

An intelligent, multi-network interface device that is responsible for forward packets

between different interfaces based on data link layer address information. When a

packet is received, its source MAC address will automatically be learned and

maintained in the bridging address table. At the same time, the forwarding decision is

made based on its destination MAC address by consulting the bridging address table.

A table containing mapping (association) between MAC addresses and interfaces in a

bridge. The table is automatically learned (by inspecting each and every packet it sees

from each interface) and used for packet forward decision making by the bridge. See

Bridge.