Cyclades User's Guide manual Network Mask

	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 number used by software to separate the local subnet address
	from the rest of a given Internet protocol address
	Network masks divide IP addresses into two parts (network
	address and address of a particular host within the network).
	Mask have the same form as IP addresses (for example,
	255.255.255.0), however, its value is needed to be understood as
	a 32-bit number with certain number of ones on the left end and
	zeros as the rest. The mask cannot have an arbitrary value. The
	primary function of a subnet mask is to define the number of IP
	hosts that participate in an IP subnet. Computers in the same IP
	subnet should not require a router for network communication.
NFS	Network File System is a protocol suite developed and licensed by
	Sun Microsystems that allows different makes of computers
	running different operating systems to share files and disk
	storage. NFS is implemented using a connectionless protocol
	(UDP) in order to make it stateless.
NTP	Network Time Protocol. A standard for synchronizing your
	system clock with the ``true time'', defined as the average of many
	high-accuracy clocks around the world.

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