Technical Terms

Description for terms and abbreviations that are used on this site.

BitTorrent is the name of a peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution client application and also of its related file sharing protocol, both of which were created by programmer Bram Cohen. BitTorrent is designed to distribute large amounts of data widely without incurring the corresponding consumption in costly server and bandwidth resources. For more details, please refer to www.bittorrent.com.

File Allocation Table (FAT) is a file system developed by Microsoft for MS-DOS. The FAT file system is considered relatively uncomplicated, and is consequently supported by virtually all existing operating systems for personal computers. The maximum size of a single file is limited to 4GB or when the drive has been formatted using the disk utility of the network drive to 127GB.

FTP or file transfer protocol is a commonly used protocol for exchanging files over any network that supports the TCP/IP protocol (such as the Internet or an intranet). There are two computers involved in an FTP transfer: a server (network drive) and a client (user’s computer).

An Internet service provider (ISP) is a company that offers its customers access to the Internet.

A Local Area Network (LAN) is a computer network covering a small local area, like a home, office, or small group of buildings such as a home, office, or college.

The Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE) is a network protocol for encapsulating Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) frames inside Ethernet frames. It is used mainly with DSL services where individual users connect to the DSL modem over Ethernet.

Server Message Block (SMB) is a network application-level protocol mainly applied to share files, printers, serial ports, and miscellaneous communications between nodes on a network.

Simple Network Time Protocol (SNTP) is a protocol for synchronizing the time over the network.

A torrent can mean either a .torrent metadata file or all files described by it, depending on context. The torrent file contains metadata about all the files it makes downloadable, including their names and sizes and checksums of all pieces in the torrent. It also contains the address of a tracker that coordinates communication between the peers in the swarm.