Glossary
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.
N
NDIS
Network Device Interface Specification. The NDIS specification is used for all communication with network adapters. The specification was developed by Microsoftr 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.
