Glossary
GL-8 Issue 1 September 1994
M

manager

A software program housed within a network management
station. The manager has the ability to query agents, receive
agent responses, and set specific variables using various SNMP
commands.

MIB

Management Information Base. The set of variables a gateway
running SNMP maintains. Standard, minimal MIBs have been
defined, and vendors often have private enterprise MIBs. In
theory, any SNMP manager can talk to any SNMP agent with a
properly defined MIB. MIB-II refers to an extended management
database that contains variables not shared by SNMP.
N

NDIS

Network Device Interface Specification. The NDIS specification
is used for all communication with network adapters. The
specification was developed by Microsoft and 3COM to provide
a common programming interface for MAC drivers and transport
drivers. NDIS works primarily with LAN manager and allows
multiple protocol stacks to share a single network interface card.

network address

A unique number associated with a host that identifies it to other
hosts during network transactions. This is the network portion of
an IP address. For a class A network, the network address is the
first byte of the IP address. For a class B network, the network
address is the first two bytes of the IP address. For a class C
network, the network address is the first three bytes of the IP
address. In each case, the remainder is the host address. In the
Internet, assigned network addresses are globally unique.