Appendix D. Definitions of terms

Domain

A domain is a country, organization, or subdivision. All countries have one top domain for the country, except for the United States, which is divided into a commercial domain (.com), a non-profit organizational domain (.org), a university domain (.edu), a military domain (.mil), a governmental domain (.gov), and a network domain (.net). All domains are hierarchical and each domain is responsible for the domains directly under it.

A domain can have several sub-domains, which in turn can have sub-domains and so on. The structure combines the domain name of the organization with the overlying domain name.

For example, Stanford University has the domain name stanford, which is under the university domain of USA, .edu; together they form the domain stanford.edu. The uni- versity also has different departments under stanford.edu.

The departments of a company or organization can request a sub-domain from the do- main manager. If the tech support people in the company’s service division want their own domain, they can go to their domain manager and request a domain called, for in- stance, service. Below, we have ‘Company Inc.,’ which consists of three departments: A sales department, a service department, and a computer department. The computer department is divided into an IBM section and a Unisys section.

Contact your internet service provider to register a domain.

Dynamic routing

Dynamic routing is used when the traffic between two computers have several routes available. The route for the packets can be changed if a connection is broken or a router is turned off. RIP is a protocol handling dynamic routing.

Firewall

A device that prevents unauthorized access to a computer network.

Forwarding

See Relay.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)

Imagine that you have an account on a UNIX machine. You can retrieve and store files on the UNIX machine with FTP. The program that manages this is called the FTP

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