Glossary of IT terms

Click on letter to jump to the list of terms starting with that letter. Click on a term to jump to the full definition. Excerpts on this page usually show the beginning of each definition.

• 0..9 and symbols
  • 5ESS — 5th-release Electronic Switching System
  • 127.0.0.1 — Also known as localhost this is a special network address (IP address) of the loopback network interface on the local host. It always directs traffic to the local machine. Also sometimes referred to as the computer's Home address.
• A
  • AAUI — Apple's Auxilary Unit Interface
  • Access Point (AP) — A hardware device or a computer's software that acts as a communication hub for users of a wireless device to connect to a wired LAN. APs are important for providing heightened wireless security and for extending the physical range of service to which a wireless user has access.
  • ASCII — American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) in computer science is a standard way of encoding what is commonly referred to as "plain text".
  • Athena — MIT's academic computing system.
• B
  • Base Station — A hardware device or a computer's software that acts as a communication hub for users of a wireless device to connect to a wired LAN. APs are important for providing heightened wireless security and for extending the physical range of service to which a wireless user has access.
• C
  • CAMS — Collaboration Accounts Management System of CAMS is a part of MIT's Touchstone single sign-on infrastructure. It is used to register and manage identities for users outside the MIT community who may need to access MIT services.
  • Certificate — An electronic credential that allows access to secure web applications.
  • Certificate Authority — A trusted third-party organization or company that issues digital certificates used to create digital signatures and public-private key pairs.
  • Confluence — a wiki web application created by Atlassian software.
  • Container — A term used in the context of Microsoft Windows Domains and Group Policy. Containers hold groups of items to which policies and settings can be applied remotely.
• D
  • debAthena — The latest version of the Athena operating environment, based on Ubuntu Linux. Also known as Debathena and Athena 10, although debAthena is the preferred spelling as it emphasizes the Athena part over the Debian part
  • Delete (email) — When you delete email it is not immediately erased from the mail server or your local computer. Instead, it is marked for removal. Email marked for removal that has not been purged can be recovered. Deleted email stored on the mail server continues to count towards your until you purge it.
  • DHCP — An Internet protocol for automating the configuration of computers that use TCP/IP.
  • DID — Direct Inward Dial (DID) number. A DID is a telephone number that can be dialed from outside of MIT, is routed to MIT's telephone network by other carriers on whose network the number may be dialed, and is then connected to an MIT telephone by MIT's voice network. MIT pays for a pool of direct inward dial numbers from outside telecommunications providers.
  • DITR — Distributed Information Technology Resources (DITR), MIT IS&T's desk-side support resources
  • DITR+ — A VIP help service for senior members of the MIT administration and their staff
  • DITR Plus — A VIP help service for senior members of the MIT administration and their staff
  • DLC — Departments, Labs, and Centers (DLCs) is used as a catch-all term to indicate an organizational unit at MIT
  • DNS — An Internet service that translates domain names into IP addresses.
  • DUE — The MIT Dean for Undergraduate Education and associated offices and business units
• E
  • emergency.mit.edu — the host name of MIT's emergency web site. This site is replicated at emergency.mit.net
  • emergency.mit.net — the host name of MIT's emergency web site. This site is replicated at emergency.mit.edu
  • Ethernet — Ethernet is a standard for connecting computers into a local area network (LAN).
  • Ethernet Adapter Card (Network Interface Card, pcmcia Card) — A network interface card, sometimes built in to a computer, or inserted into a PCMCIA slot.
  • Ethernet Drop — A wall or floor outlet, often associated with a telephone jack, into which you can plug a network cable and thus physically connect a computer to the network. At MIT, this requires registering for DHCP.
  • Exchange — Exchange is an integrated email and calendering service offered by IS&T.
• F
• G
  • Gateway — A node on a network that serves as an entrance to another network.
  • Global Address List (GAL) — The global address list (GAL) is a directory that contains entries for every group, user, and contact within MIT's implementation of Microsoft Exchange Server. For Exchange users, the GAL is displayed in the Outlook, Entourage or OWA Address Book on your computer.
  • GTD — Getting Things Done (GTD)
• H
  • Hermes — a knowledge base and help web application developed and run at MIT for the MIT community.
  • Hesiod — A name service that keeps track of information (e.g., post office servers, printers, and machines) in a distributed network environment such as MITnet. Hesiod keeps track of each registered MIT email user's post office server where his/her email account resides.
  • Home address — usually refers to localhost or 127.0.0.1, which are special addresses that always refer to the computer they are being referenced on.
  • Home page — can have several different meanings depending on context. It most commonly refers to the top-most page of a web site for a person or organization.
• I
  • ICANN — Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
  • IMAP — IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) is a client-server approach to email in which email is kept on the server. When you work with email, your email program (the client) connects to the post office server to access your email. Since your email stays on the server, you can easily access it from multiple workstations and programs just like you can access your voice mail messages from any phone.
  • Incoming Mail Server (Post Office Server) — The server on which messages sent to your email address reside.
  • IP address — An Internet Protocol (IP) address is a numeric address that identifies a computer or network device on the internet. There are different IP standards such as IPv4 and IPv6. IPv4 is by far the most common one. IPv4 addresses take the form of four bytes, usually written in decimal notation, separated by periods.
• J
• K
  • Kerberos — An authentication system used to prove your identity to servers and systems.
• L
  • localhost — "localhost" is the standard host name given to a computer's loopback network interface.
  • loopback — The term "loopback" or "loop-back" refers to a special route that sends traffic from your computer back to itself, usually without this traffic actually being sent out over the network.
• M
  • MAC (Media Access Control) Address — A unique identifier on a network interface card; on most wireless cards, this is the 12 character (hexadecimal) string printed on the card.
  • MIME — MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) is an encoding method designed for exchanging binary files over the Internet (particularly via email messages) in a standardized, platform-independent form using a coding scheme called base64. A MIME-encoded message can contain several parts, each of which can be a different type of file: ASCII text, pictures, video, sound, or any other type of binary data.
  • MIT Alert — the Institute's emergency notification program, designed to provide information and advisories via a number of communication channels
  • MITnet — the short name for the MIT campus network.
  • moira — A large database and API containing user, machine, list, filesystem, and other essential information to manage the MITnet, MIT Email, and Athena infrastructures.
  • moira list — a mailing list, group list, or mail alias managed through MIT's moira central database.
• N
• O
  • OEIT — The Office of Educational Innovation and Technology
  • Outgoing Mail Server — The server that routes email messages to incoming servers on the Internet. Outgoing mail servers are also referred to as SMTP servers. The outgoing mail server at MIT is named outgoing.mit.edu and secure connections are recommended.
  • OWA — Outlook Web Access is the web email client for the Exchange integrated email and calendering service.
  • owa.mit.edu — The server name for our Outlook Web Access (OWA) instance. See also OWA.
• P
  • Email Quota — Each IMAP email account has a 1 GB disk quota on the post office server. You should check your post office quota regularly and archive old mail to keep yourself below quota.
  • PCMCIA — Short for Personal Computer Memory Card International Association
  • Phishing — an illegitimate solicitation via email for personal information, disguised as coming from a legitimate source. They often ask for usernames and password. THESE MESSAGES SHOULD BE IGNORED AND NEVER RESPONDED TO.
  • POP (Post Office Protocol) — POP (Post Office Protocol) was the recommended method for accessing your mail before IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol). POP is a basic store and forward mail handling system. When you connect to the mail server, your mail is downloaded to your machine (or home directory on Athena) and deleted from the server. It does not support reading mail from multiple locations or have the modern message handling features of IMAP.
  • Purge (email) — Purging email is when the messages you have marked for removal by the delete command are erased from the server or your local computer drive. Once email is purged it cannot be recovered. Be sure you have archived or do not need any messages marked for deletion before you issue the purge command.
• Q
• R
  • Ribbon — a term coined by Microsoft for its new user interface tool bar in Microsoft Office 2007 applications
• S
  • SAP — MIT's major financial/business management application.
  • SLA — Service Level Agreement
  • SMTP — SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is a standard set of rules that define an email message format, and the message transfer agent (MTA), which stores and forwards email.
  • Space — a term used in Confluence (which powers Hermes) to indicate a collection of pages with their own access control and look-and-feel settings.
  • Split Mailbox — A method of forwarding your @mit.edu email to another email account while having a copy still sent to your MIT (Athena) account.
  • Stellar — Stellar is MIT's course management system. It is a platform for learning, course management and collaboration, serving the entire MIT community.
• T
  • TCP IP (Transmission Control Protocol Internet Protocol) — These two protocols were developed by the U.S. military to allow computers to talk to each other over long distance networks.
  • Torrent — usually refers to a file downloadable via the BitTorrent client or other peer-to-peer file sharing clients implementing BitTorrent's peer-to-peer protocol.
  • Touchstone — MIT Touchstone is a suite of technologies for authenticating a variety of web applications. It was introduced at MIT in 2008. It is focused on supporting web applications. It is not suitable for authenticating native desktop applications.
  • Transceiver — A piece of networking hardware usually used to moderate interfaces.
  • Trojan — A program that appears desirable to encourage downloading and/or running the program, but actually contains something undesirable, often in addition to the desirable program.
• U
  • UTP (Unshielded Twisted Pair) — A type of interface used to connect workstations or printers to 5ESS (digital phone) jacks, and then to MITnet.
• V
  • VoIP — Voice Over Internet Protocol. MIT's primary phone service is based on this.
  • VPN — stands for Virtual Private Network and refers to a server and client software allowing computers to connect securely over the internet to a server on a private or institutional network, such as MITnet, making it appear to the computer that it is directly connected to this network.
• W
  • wikis.mit.edu — wikis.mit.edu is MIT's central wiki server. The wiki service running on wikis.mit.edu is based on Atlassian's Confluence enterprise wiki application, and is available to the entire MIT community.
  • win.mit.edu — MIT's central Windows domain
  • WinAthena — A legacy name for some computers in the win.mit.edu domain. This term should no longer be used as it has no well-defined meaning.
• X
• Y
• Z