Glossary

S

SC
Subscriber Connector. This is a type of fiber optic connector used in 100BASE-FX fiber optic media systems. The connector is designed to be pushed into place, automatically seating itself.

Segment
A cable made up of one or more cable sections and connections joined together to produce the equivalence of a continuous cable.

Shared key authentication
Shared key authentication uses a secret key that each station belonging to the network must use in order to communication with other stations on the network. 

Slot Time
A unit of time used in the medium access control (MAC) Protocol for Ethernet.

SNMP
Simple Network Management Protocol. The de facto standard for switch management. A familiarity with MIB objects is necessary to manage a switch with an SNMP management program. SNMP is not necessarily limited to TCP/IP networks.

SMTP
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, a protocol for sending e-mail messages between servers. Most e-mail systems that send mail over the Internet use SMTP to send messages from one server to another; the messages can then be retrieved with an e-mail client using either POP or IMAP. In addition, SMTP is generally used to send messages from a mail client to a mail server. This is why you need to specify both the POP or IMAP server and the SMTP server when you configure your e-mail application.

Spanning Tree Protocol
A link management protocol providing path redundancy and preventing network loops by defining a tree to span all switches in a network. It forces redundant data paths into a standby (blocked) state. If a path malfunctions, the topology is reconfigured and the link reestablished by activating the standby path.

SSID
An SSID (Service Set Identifier) is essentially the name of the wireless network. Each computer and access point connected to a particular wireless LAN must be configured with the same SSID.

Star Topology
A network topology in which each station on the network is connected directly to a hub.