N

Name service switch: Used to direct requests to the correct name service in use on the system or network.

Name service: A network service that provides a means of identifying and locating resources such as hostnames and IP addresses available to a network. The default name service product available in the Solaris operating environment is Network Information Service Plus (NIS+).

Namespace: Stores name service information that users, workstations, and applications must have to communicate across the network. Namespace can also refer to the set of all names in a naming system, such as

NIS+ namespaceA collection of hierarchical network information used by the NIS+ software.
NIS namespaceA collection of nonhierarchical network information used by the NIS software.
DNSnamespace A collection of networked workstations that use the DNS software.

Network address: The address, consisting of up to 20 octets, used to locate an Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) transport entity. The address is formatted into an initial domain part that is standardized for each of several addressing domains, and a domain-specific part that is the responsibility of the addressing authority for that domain.

Network class: Network addresses are divided into three classes: Class A, Class B, and Class C. This addressing scheme is called classful IPv4 addressing.

Network interface: Also referred to as a network adapter or NIC (network interface card). A printed circuit board that plugs into both the clients and servers in a network. It controls the exchange of data between them at the data link level, also known as the access method (OSI layers 1 and 2).

Network mask: A number used by software to separate the local subnet address from the rest of a given Internet protocol address.

Network port: A software network port is an identified doorway (address) for communicating between a program and another communications system or program, often passing through a hardware port. The network port is usually numbered and a standard network implementation such as TCP, UDP, or IP will attach a port number to data it sends. The receiving implementation will guard and listen at the attached port number (doorway) to figure out which program to send data to on its system. A port may send/receive data one direction at a time (simplex) or simultaneously in both directions (duplex). These software network ports may also connect internal programs on a single computer system. In TCP and UDP, the combination of a port and a network address (IP number) is called a socket.

Network printer: A printer that is physically attached to the network and has its own hostname and IP address. A network printer provides printing services to print clients without being directly cabled to a print server.

Network protocol: The part of the network that you configure but cannot see. It's the software portion of the network that controls data transmission between systems across the network.

Network service: A term used to describe services offered by servers to network clients such as FTP, Telnet, and HTTP.

Network-based file system: File systems accessed over the network. Typically, they reside on one system (the server) and are accessed by other systems (clients) across the network.

NFS daemons: Processes that support NFS activities. These daemons can support both NFS client and NFS server activity, NFS server activity alone, or logging of the NFS server activity.

NFS logging: Provides a record of all NFS activity on network file systems that have been shared with the logging option enabled.

NFS (Network File System): This service lets computers of different architectures, running different operating systems (OSs), share file systems across a network.

NIS client: The hosts in the NIS domain, including the master and slave servers.

NIS (Network Information Service): A distributed network information service containing key information about the systems and the users on the network. The NIS database is stored on the master server and all the replica or slave servers.

NIS+ authorization: The process of granting NIS+ principals access rights to an NIS+ object.

NIS+ security levels: Let NIS+ administrators specify different read, modify, create, and destroy rights to NIS+ objects for each class.

NIS+: This is similar to NIS, but with more features. NIS+ is not an extension of NIS, but a new software program designed to replace NIS.

NSCD: Speeds up queries of the most common data and the getent command to retrieve naming service information from specified databases.

NVRAM (nonvolatile random-access memory): The NVRAM chip has user-definable system parameters and writeable areas for user-controlled diagnostics, macros, and device aliases. The NVRAM is where the system identification information is stored, such as the hostid, Ethernet address, and time-of-day (TOD) clock.