Glossary

This page will be constantly added to over time.

distro	It stands for ‘distribution.’ A Linux distro or distribution is a collection of software, including and based upon the Linux kernel, that is packaged up ready for you to install as an operating system. Commonly known distros of Linux are Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, Arch Linux and Manjaro. You may have also heard of Raspbian, now known as Raspberry Pi OS.
Fedora	A Linux distro. It is a community distro, though the vendor Red Hat is its primary sponsor. You can find out more about the Fedora Project here. Fedora is upstream of RHEL (see below) which means that RHEL releases are based on Fedora releases. See this Red Hat page which explains how this works.
MAC	This depends on the context, and is either: – Mandatory Access Control. This is an approach to access control. Historically, Linux uses Discretionary Acess Control (DAC), but it is recognised that this has its limitations. Enter MAC with Linux Security Modules (or LSM). Examples of implementation of MAC are SELinux and AppArmor. or – Media Access Control address. This is an unique identifier assigned to a network interface card or controller (NIC). A MAC address is sometimes referred to as a hardware address or ethernet address. It’s most usually recognised as a string of six groups of two hexadecimals, separated by colons (that is, of the form xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx). You can find out more about MAC addresses on Wikipedia.
NAS	Network Attached Storage. Storage devices that serve storage as files to consumers. To the consumer, NAS-supplied storage would look very much like a network-attached filesystem (eg, via NFS or CIFS). You can read more about NAS technology at SNIA’s primer here.
OS	Operating System. A collection of software, hardware drivers and kernel that is installed on a computer and allows it to interact with users, other computers and applications.
RHEL	Red Hat Enterprise Linux. A Linux distro developed and distributed by the vendor Red Hat. You can find out more about it at Red Hat’s own page or Wikipedia.
SAN	Storage Area Network. A collection of storage devices and mechanisms to configure and connect the storage to storage consumers (generally, but not always, servers). Connections to a SAN generally use a ‘switched fabric technology.’ SNIA have an excellent primer on SANs.
STEM	A quick way of referring to the collective fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths.
sysadmin	Systems administrator, systems engineer. Someone who configures and looks after computer systems (generally servers or enterprise-class systems).
UI	User Interface. Any mechanism through which a user interacts (or interfaces) with a program. Two noteworthy kinds of user interfaces are: – CLI or command line interface. The interaction between the user and the machine is in the form of text. – GUI or graphical user interface. The interaction is in graphical form (eg, images, icons and menus) and can include keyboard, mouse and touch-screen actions.
WYSIWYG	What You See Is What You Get. Refers to software that allows editing in a way that is (or pretty close to) its final appearance when displayed or printed. Definition culled from Wikipedia.

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