Here are some of the abbreviations and terminology used throughout
this manual.
HOSTNAME is the tcp/ip name of a computer or packet system.
INTERNET is a worldwide high speed computer network. It has
thousands of computers at schools, companies and amateur packet
radio systems connected to it.
MTU, or Maximum Transmission Unit, is the maximum data size in
one packet. Most often the data referred to by MTU is the transported
data, i.e. data frame in a network connection. With tcp/ip, the
size of the tcp/ip frame inside the ax.25 packet is the MTU; with
net/rom, the size of the data inside the netrom packet is the MTU.
NRS, or Net/Rom Serial protocol, is what TNCs with Net/Rom or
TheNet eproms talk on the serial port.
NODE, and MAILBOX are terms used interchangeably for the user
interface when connected to the system.
PACLEN, or packet length, is most often used to refer to data
size in a link packet. The data in an ax.25 packet can be up to
paclen bytes.
PORT, or INTERFACE means the physical connection to a radio or
other system (i.e., radio port or serial interface). These two
terms are used interchangeably.
RFCs, or Requests For Comment, are standard papers used on
Internet to discuss and propose new networking protocols and
other related topics.
RSPF, or Radio Shortest Path First, is a tcp/ip routing protocol
especially targeted at radio environments.
RTT, or Round Trip Time, indicates the time needed for data to
be sent and acknowledged.
SLIP, or Serial Line IP, is a way to send IP frames over a serial
port without using ax.25 or ethernet to carry the data. You can
use SLIP to connect to PCs or Unix systems also running SLIP,
and interchange tcp/ip data.
PPP, or point-to-point protocol, is an alternative to SLIP, that
has the advantage of automatically configuring IP addresses,
compression, and MTU.
(Courtesy KBNorton Computer Services)
