Linux+ acronyms

GPIO

A general-purpose input/output (GPIO) is an uncommitted digital signal pin on an integrated circuit or electronic circuit board whose behavior—including whether it acts as input or output—is controllable by the user at run time.

ACL

Access control list.: The section within an inode of a file or directory that lists the permissions assigned to users and groups on the file or directory.

BIOS

BIOS (Basic Input/Output System), which is the part of a computer system that contains the programs used to initialize hardware components at boot time. You can access your BIOS configuration by pressing the appropriate manufacturer-specific key, such as F10, during system startup.

FTP

File Transfer Protocol. A protocol is a system of rules that networked computers use to communicate with one another. FTP is a client-server protocol that may be used to transfer files between computers on the internet. The client asks for the files and the server provides them.

GCC

GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) the command used to compile source code written in the C programming language into binary programs.

MD5

Message Digest 5. A hashing function used to provide integrity. MD5 uses 128 bits. A hash is simply a number created by applying the algorithm to a file or message at different times. The hashes are compared to each other to verify that integrity has been maintained.

MOTD

Message of the Day greated by linux msg when you log in command /etc/motd

NAT

Network Address Translation A service that translates public IP addresses to private and private IP addresses to public. It hides addresses on an internal network. The main use of NAT is to limit the number of public IP addresses an organization or company must use, for both economy and security purposes.

NFS

Network File System Is a client/server application that lets a computer user view and optionally store and update file on a remote computer as though they were on the user's own computer. The user's system needs to have an NFS client and the other computer needs the NFS server.

NTP

Network Time Protocol: Protocol used to synchronize computer times. A protocol that can be used to obtain time information from other computers on the Internet.

NTFS

New Technology File System: A file system used in Microsoft operating systems that provides security. NTFS uses the DAC model.

OTP

One Time Password: also known as one-time pin or dynamic password, is a password that is valid for only one login session or transaction, on a computer system or other digital device. ... OTPs have been discussed as a possible replacement for, as well as enhancer to, traditional passwords.

OVA

Open Virtualization Appliance: An OVA file is a virtual appliance used by virtualization applications such as VMware Workstation and Oracle VM Virtualbox. It is a package that contains files used to describe a virtual machine, which includes an .OVF descriptor file, optional manifest (.MF) and certificate files, and other related files.

OVF

Open virtualization format: packages and distributes virtual appliances, and software to be run on virtual machines.

PCI

Peripheral Component Interconnect: is an interconnection system between a microprocessor and attached devices in which expansion slots are spaced closely for high speed operation.

PAM

Pluggable Authentication Modules. is a mechanism to integrate multiple low-level authentication schemes into a high-level application programming interface (API). It allows programs that rely on authentication to be written independent of the underlying authentication scheme.

PXE

Pre-Execution Boot: Pronounced pixie, PXE is one of the components of Intel's WfM specification. It allows a workstation to boot from a server on a network prior to booting the operating system on the local hard drive.

YAML

Yet Another Markup Language is a human-readable data-serialization language. It is commonly used for configuration files, but could be used in many applications where data is being stored or transmitted. YAML targets many of the same communications applications as XML but has a minimal syntax which intentionally differs from SGML.

RAID

redundant array of independent disks; a group of two or more integrated hard disks RAID is a data storage virtualization technology that combines multiple physical disk drive components into one or more logical units for the purposes of data redundancy, performance improvement, or both.

SUID

The set user ID (SUID) option is used in conjunction with executable files, and it tells Linux to run the program with the permissions of whoever owns the file rather than with the permissions of the user who runs the program.

TCP

Transmission Control Protocol - provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of a stream of packets on the internet. TCP is tightly linked with IP and usually seen as TCP/IP in writing.

TLS

Transport Layer Security. Used to encrypt traffic on the wire. TLS is the replacement for SSL. TLS is a protocol that provides authentication, privacy, and data integrity between two communicating computer applications.

UTF

Unicode Transformation Format. A compressed format that allows computers to display and manipulate text.

UEFI

Unified Extensible Firmware Interface. A method used to boot some systems and intended to replace Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) firmware.

USB

Universal Serial Bus: A type of connection used to attach devices such as flash drives, scanners, cameras, and printers to a computer.

IO

input output

DHCP

(Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) A set of rules that allow network client computers to find and use the Internet address that corresponds to a domain name. Because DHCP assigns IP addresses for a specific period of time (a lease period), using commands like ipconfig to find your computer's IP address will yield different results over time.

RDMA

(Remote Direct Memory Access) In computing, remote direct memory access is a direct memory access from the memory of one computer into that of another without involving either one's operating system.

SATA

(Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) is a the most common standard for connecting hard drives into computer systems A technology that allows for fast data transfer along a serial cable for hard disks and SSDs. It is commonly used in newer workstation and server-class computers.

VNC

(Virtual Network Computing): A program that allows you to control a computer at a remote location.

CPU

Central Processing Unit; the brain of the computer. Where most calculations take place

CIFS

Common Internet File System (CIFS) is a network filesystem protocol used for providing shared access to files and printers between machines on the network. A CIFS client application can read, write, edit and even remove files on the remote server. Better off using SMB (server message block)

XFS

Extends File System .XFS

EFI

Extensible Firmware Interface System (EFI) defines an interface between an operating system and platform firmware. The interface consists of data tables that contain platform-related information, boot service calls, and runtime service calls that are available to the operating system and its loader. These provide a standard environment for booting an operating system and running pre-boot applications.

EPEL

Extra packages for enterprise linux (EPEL) is a Fedora Special Interest Group that creates, maintains, and manages a high quality set of additional packages for Enterprise Linux, including, but not limited to, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS and Scientific Linux (SL), Oracle Linux (OL).

GRUB

GRand Unified Bootloader commonly referred to as GRUB) is a boot loader package from the GNU Project. GRUB is the reference implementation of the Free Software Foundation's Multiboot Specification, which provides a user the choice to boot one of multiple operating systems installed on a computer or select a specific kernel configuration available on a particular operating system's partitions.

GPT

GUID partition table is a newer partition type that is used to create drives larger than 2 TB. It is a standard for the layout of partition tables of a physical computer storage device, such as a hard disk drive or solid-state drive, using universally unique identifiers, which are also known as globally unique identifiers

GUID

Globally Unique Identifier is a term used by Microsoft for a number that its programming generates to create a unique identity for an entity such as a Word document. GUIDs are widely used in Microsoft products to identify interfaces, replica sets, records, and other objects.

GUI

Graphical User Interface a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and visual indicators such as secondary notation, instead of text-based user interfaces, typed command labels or text navigation.

httpd

HTTP Daemon is a software program that runs in the background of a web server and waits for the incoming server requests. The daemon answers the request automatically and serves the hypertext and multimedia documents over the Internet using HTTP. Apache is the world's most common Web server. It started as the HTTP Daemon

HBA

Host Bus Adapter (HBA) is a circuit board and/or integrated circuit adapter that provides input/output (I/O) processing and physical connectivity between a host system, or server, and a storage and/or network device. Because an HBA typically relieves the host microprocessor of both data storage and retrieval tasks, it can improve the server's performance time. An HBA and its associated disk subsystems are sometimes referred to as a disk channel.

HTTP

Hyper Text Transfer Protocol - the protocol used for transmitting web pages over the Internet

ISO

International Organization for Standardization

IPSEC

Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) is a secure network protocol suite that authenticates and encrypts the packets of data sent over an Internet Protocol network. It is used in virtual private networks (VPNs).

IP

Internet Protocol. is a numerical label assigned to each device connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.[1][2] An IP address serves two main functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing.

JSON

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) - a popular data interchange format, JSON is a technology standard often used to format data when being sent or received via APIs.

KDE

K Desktop Environment One of the two competing graphical user interfaces (GUIs) available for Linux.

LDAP

Lightweight Directory Authentication/Access Protocol is an open, vendor-neutral, industry standard application protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed directory information services over an Internet Protocol (IP) network

LUKS

Linux Unified Key Setup commonly used by Linux to encrypt storage media volumes. LUKS is implemented in the Linux kernel in dm-crypt (dm = Device Mapper) and the user-space component cryptsetup.

LVM

Logical Volume Management. (LVM) allows for very flexible disk space management. It provides features like the ability to add disk space to a logical volume and its filesystem while that filesystem is mounted and active and it allows for the collection of multiple physical hard drives and partitions into a single volume group which can then be divided into logical volumes.

MBR

Master Boot Record. An area on a hard disk in its first sector. When the BIOS boots a system, it looks at the MBR for instructions and information on how to boot the disk and load the operating system. Some malware tries to hide here.

PID

Process ID: process ID (PID) that allows the kernel to identify it uniquely. In addition, each process can start an unlimited number of other processes called child processes. Conversely, each process must have been started by an existing process called a parent process. As a result, each process has a parent process ID (PPID), which identifies the process that started it.

PTY

Pseudoterminal: A shell obtained during a telnet session runs on a pseudoterminal (a terminal that does not obtain input directly from the computer keyboard) rather than a local terminal, and it works much the same way a normal shell does; you can execute commands and use the exit command to kill the BASH shell and end the session.

PKI

Public Key Infrastructure: is the set of hardware, software, policies, processes, and procedures required to create, manage, distribute, use, store, and revoke digital certificates and public-keys.

RPM

Red Hat Package Manager: is a free and open-source package management system. The name RPM refers to .rpm file format and the package manager program itself. RPM was intended primarily for Linux distributions; the file format is the baseline package format of the Linux Standard Base.

RADIUS

Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service: is a client/server protocol and software that enables remote access servers to communicate with a central server to authenticate dial-in users and authorize their access to the requested system or service. RADIUS is an open protocol distributed as a source code.

SHA

Secure Hash Algorithm. A hashing function used to provide integrity. SHA1 uses 160 bits, and SHA-256 uses 256 bits. Hashing algorithms always provide a fixed-size bit-string regardless of the size of the hashed data. By comparing the hashes at two different times, you can verify integrity of the data.

SSH

Secure Shell: A technology that can be used to run remote applications on a Linux computer; it encrypts all client-server traffic.

SSL

Secure Sockets Layer. Used to encrypt traffic on the wire. SSL is used with HTTPS to encrypt HTTP traffic on the Internet using both symmetric and asymmetric encryption algorithms. SSL uses port 443 when encrypting HTTPS traffic.

SELinux

Security-Enhanced Linux. A trusted operating system platform that prevents malicious or suspicious code from executing on both Linux and UNIX systems. It is one of the few operating systems that use the MAC model.

SMB

Server Message Block:one version of which was also known as Common Internet File System (CIFS) operates as an application-layer or presentation-layer network protocol mainly used for providing shared access to files, printers, and serial ports and miscellaneous communications between nodes on a network. It also provides an authenticated inter-process communication mechanism.

SNMP

Simple Network Management Protocol. is an Internet Standard protocol for collecting and organizing information about managed devices on IP networks and for modifying that information to change device behavior. Resides on application layer

SCSI

Small Computer System Interfacewas designed as a way to connect multiple peripherals to the system in a scalable, high-speed manner. In most systems, a SCSI device is connected to a controller card, which, in turn, connects all devices attached to it to the system. However, many other types of SCSI disk configurations and technologies are available, including Parallel SCSI, Serial Attached SCSI, and iSCSI.

TAR

Tape Archiver It is an archiving program that is designed to store and extract files from an archive file known as a tar file, while preserving file system information such as permissions, dates, etc ... .tar

TACACS

Terminal Access Controller Access-Control System: An older remote authentication protocol that was commonly used in UNIX networks. TACACS + is more commonly used.

TTY

Terminal type example (tty1), (tty2)

BASH

The Bourne again shell (Bash) is a common application to offer a shell command line; other common shell applications are the C shell, the Bourne shell, and the Kern shell.

VM

Virtual machine. A virtual system hosted on a physical system. A physical server can host multiple VMs as servers. Virtualization can reduce the footprint of an organization's server room or datacenter, and helps eliminate wasted resources. It also helps reduce the amount of physical equipment, reducing overall physical security requirements. A VM escape is an attack that allows an attacker to access the host system from within the virtual system.

VPN

Virtual private network: A virtual private network extends a private network across a public network, and enables users to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if their computing devices were directly connected to the private network.

XRDP

XWindows Remote Desktop Protocol: is a free and open-source implementation of Microsoft RDP server that enables operating systems other than Microsoft Windows to provide a fully functional RDP-compatible remote desktop experience

YUM

Yellowdog Updater Modified package management utility for RPM based systems

GPU

graphics processing unit; transforms data into pixels that are displayed on the monitor