The type of cabling used in a network is called the network medium. Today, networks use many types of cables, although only a few types are in common usage. Some of the more exotic types of cables are very expensive. The type of cabling can have an influence on the speed of the network, although for most small- to medium-sized local area networks this is not a major issue. Twisted pair cabling is one of the most commonly used network mediums because it is cheap and easy to wor....

An SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server is a machine that transports mail, just like a Web server is a machine that displays Web pages when requested. An SMTP server is sometimes referred to as an outgoing mail server, which brings me to the point—you need one in order to complete the exercises in this chapter. On Linux/UNIX, Sendmail and Qmail are popular packages. On Windows, the SMTP service in the Windows NT Service Pack, or the service built into....

When we think of Trojans, we normally think of the huge wooden horse that the Greeks gifted the city of Troy, in which they had secretly hidden a small number of their warriors. When the Trojans took the horse into the city the soldiers emerged and opened the gates to the cities enemies. Computer trojans are based on the same idea; what can appear to be useful program or harmless site can be hiding a small Trojan program that once it has infected your computer opens a secret b....

In 1994, an incredibly forward-thinking man named Rasmus Lerdorf developed a set of tools that used a parsing engine to interpret a few macros here and there. They were not extravagant: a guest book, a counter, and some other "home page" elements that were cool when the Web was in its infancy. He eventually combined these tools with a form interpretation (FI) package he had written, added some database support, and released what was known as PHP/FI.Then, in the spiri....

The Domain Name System is one way to resolve host names in a TCP/IP environment. In non-Microsoft environments, host names are typically resolved through host files or DNS. In a Microsoft environment, WINS and broadcasts are also used. DNS is the primary system used to resolve host names on the Internet. In fact, DNS had its beginning in the early days of the Internet.In its early days, the Internet was a small network established by the Department of Defens....