Letter N
NAP
Network Access Point. A point where networks and service providers hand off traffic to each other. NAPs are typically the points with the worst congestion problems. When you encounter slow responses and run a traceroute, you will usually see the slowest connections occur where one network hands off to another. See MAE.
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HTML coding for a non-breaking space. It is used in HTML between consecutive words on a web page to prevent those two words from being broken apart at the end of a line.
netiquette
Short for net etiquette. The basic principles of courtesy and consideration for others that can keep communication on the Internet a pleasure for all. See Netiquette:Guidelines for Posting in Public
newbie or newby
A newcomer to the nets, who reveals his or her inexperience by lack of knowledge of net conventions, netiquette, vocabulary, and know-how.
newsgroup
See Usenet newsgroups
NIC
Acronym for Network Interface Card, for example, an ethernet card in a network.
National Science Foundation Network. The National Science Foundation followed on the earlier ARPANet by creating NSFNet in 1986 as a 56 Kbps backbone for the Internet. Commercialization of the nets began in 1992. By 1995, the National Science Foundation withdrew its sponsorship and concentrated on funding research for newer, higher-speed initiatives.
nslookup
A common Internet utility like ping and traceroute. Given an IP address or a DNS address, it will look up and show the corresponding DNS or IP address. There are nslookup utility programs available for every operating system, which you can use with a PPP or networked or shell account. The commonly used FTP program WS_FTP Pro includes a number of utilities including nslookup.But if you have none of those readily available, there are other ways to do the same thing. If you are using Windows 95 or later, there is a traceroute utility built into the operating system. Select Start/Run and type”command”. In the window that opens, type “tracert address” without quotes and substituting the IP or DNS address you want to look up for “address”. It will trace the path to the address, showing all intermediate addresses on the current path, and the IP and DNS addresses for each. More simply, you can type “nslookup address”.Still another utility that will give you the information is WHOIS.