An interconnection of bridging devices (usually switches) installed in such a fashion that they create a loop, causing packets to loop continuously. Switches using the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) prevent bridge loops by turning off looping ports.

A connector introduced with the 10BaseT standard in which each of the eight pins connects to a single wire inside the cable, allowing devices to put voltage on the individual wires within the cable

A port on a hub that allows you to connect two hubs together using a straight-through cable

Data that has been broken up into smaller chunks by networking technologies for the purpose of transmitting it over a network

Nickname for all the 100 Mbps Ethernet standards. It originally applied to 100BaseT

A 48-bit (6-byte) binary hard-coded address that uniquely identifies each node on a network.

In an Ethernet network, a hub-like device, with intelligence that allows it to use MAC addresses to create point-to-point connections between two conversing computers, effectively giving them the full bandwidth of the network

The bus cable to which computers on an Ethernet network connect

Also called a crimping tool, a tool used to secure an RJ-45 connector (a “crimp”) onto the end of a UTP cable

A cabling standard that can handle a 1-Gbps transfer rate. Also known as 1000BaseT

Method of sending and receiving data where the device can both send and receive at the same time

Extra data added (by the sending NIC) to an Ethernet frame that is less than 64 bytes to bring the frame up to the 64-byte minimum.

A standard for crimping of four-pair UTP cable for 10BaseT networks, in which the wires are in the following order (beginning with position one): green/white, green, orange/white, blue, blue/white, orange, brown/white, brown.

On a network hub, the connections that receive the wire links from nodes.

When the NIC processes all the frames it sees on the cable, regardless of their MAC addresses

A network diagnosis program that can cause a NIC to run in promiscuous mode in order to capture all the traffic on an Ethernet network.

A protocol used in Ethernet switches that allows a switch detecting a bridge loop to disable the loop by turning off any port causing the loop.

A device at the center of a star topology network that acts like an electronic repeater in that it interprets the ones and zeros coming in from one port and repeats the same signal out to the other connected ports.

Any device with a NIC connected to an Ethernet network

A standard for crimping of four-pair UTP cable for 10BaseT networks, in which the wires are in the following order (beginning with position one): orange/white, orange, green/white, blue, blue/white, green, brown/white, brown.

A device that interprets the signals coming in from one port and repeats the same signals out to the other connected ports.

Method of sending and receiving data where the device can only send or receive at one time

Fiber-optic-based network using a token bus protocol over a ring topology running at 100 Mbps.