Cisco CCNA Networking Basics for Beginners: Getting Started

Identity and access management is the set of policies and systems that create, verify, govern and retire identities and decide what each one may reach.

Least privilege is the principle that every user, process and system should hold only the access required for its current task, and no more.

A firewall is a control that allows or blocks network traffic according to rules about its source, destination, protocol and, in modern forms, its content and the application it belongs to.

A VLAN divides one physical switched network into several logical segments, each with its own broadcast domain, by tagging frames with a VLAN identifier so that ports and devices in different VLANs cannot reach each other without a router.

Network address translation rewrites the addresses and ports in packets as they cross a network boundary, most commonly so that many devices with private addresses can share one public address to reach the internet.

DHCP is the protocol by which a device joining a network asks for and receives an address, a subnet mask, a default gateway and DNS servers from a server, for a limited lease period, so that nobody has to configure addresses by hand.

Uptime is the proportion of time a service answers requests, quoted in nines, and a service level agreement is the contract clause setting out how that proportion is counted and what the provider owes when it falls short.

Shared hosting puts your website on a machine that is simultaneously running hundreds of other people's, pooling its processor, memory and disk between all of you, which is both why it costs so little and why your speed partly depends on strangers.

A VPS is a software-defined slice of one physical machine that behaves as a server in its own right, with its own operating system, reserved CPU, memory and disk, and administrative access down to the kernel.