Glossary of Terms

N

NAT
Network Address Translation. IETF standard that allows a network to appear as a single address on the internet. NAT does the conversion to individual devices on the network. The PCs on your network are allocated IP addresses in the reserved range for private networks (192.168.254.x), either manually, or via DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol). When your PC requests information from the Internet, the router converts the private IP address of the PC into the single real IP address of the router, and then makes the request for information on behalf of the PC. The router keeps track of which internal PC requested which piece of information, and therefore passes the correct response from the Internet back to the correct PC. In this way, all the PCs on your LAN will appear to the outside world as if they all have the same IP address. This increases security, as this IP address is not of the PCs themselves, but for the router. Therefore, an external hacker cannot just directly target this single IP address to attack your network, as the router will have no record of an internal PC requesting information from the hacker, and therefore will reject the packet.

Network
Anytime you connect two or more telphone handsets or computers together so that they can share resources you have on telephone or computer network.

N-ISDN
Narrowband ISDN. The same as ISDN.

NTSC
National Television Standards Committee. The usual method of video transmission in the majority of 60Hz mains based countries such as the USA.