Terms Letter: F
Fantastico
A popular script auto-installer. A web based application included in some web hosting Control Panels (CPanel for example). It contains a collection of free scripts such as PHPBB, WordPress, PHPNuke, Mambo, etc. Using Fantastico you can easily have any of the free scripts installed on your hosting account with a few clicks. Very useful utility for people who do not have time or skills to install these on their own.
FAQ
Frequently Asked Question. A list of frequently asked questions and answers to them. FAQ are commonly used along with manuals or help guides for a given products. They are a very good way of finding solutions to different problems. Most web hosting companies have extensive FAQ with answers to commonly asked question of their customers.
Fast Ethernet
A term to describe Ethernet at 100Mbit/sec as opposed to 10Mbit/sec (just called Ethernet). These days 10 Mbit/sec ethernet networks are hard to find :).
FCC
Federal Communications Commission. FCC is the U.S. regulatory authority for telecommunications.
FDDI
Fiber Distributed Data Interface. A very high speed network protocol. A standard for transmitting data on optical fiber cables at a rate of around 100,000,000 bits-per-second. This speed is 10 times as fast as Ethernet, and about twice as fast as T-3.
Fibre Optic Cable
Also called optical fibre, it is a cable used for transmitting data as a light wave. It is more expensive that copper wire, but offers higher transmission speeds and allows data transmission over larger distances.
File permissions
Most web hosting providers run Unix servers. On UNIX servers every systems user has unique username, usually that is you web hosting account username. Each username can be a member of one or more system groups on the server.
Every file or directory on a Unix/Linux server has owner and a dedicated group.
In short the permissions define what privileges the users on the server have for a certain file.
In most FTP programs and web based file managers the file permissions are represented with numbers. For example:
index.html 644
mail.pl 755
The first number represents the owner permissions, the second the group permissions and the last one the permissions for all the other users on the system.
In general the permissions are:
1 – execute
2 – write
4 – read
So 644 means
6 (2+4) – read + write for owner
4 – read for group
4 – read for others
755
7 (2+4+1) write, read, execute for owner
5 (4+1) read and execute for group
5 (4+1) read and execute for others
Usually HTML files, images, CSS should be with 644 permissions
CGI scripts (Perl, Python, Ruby etc) should have 755 or 775 permissions in order to work.
Folders usually should have 775 or 755 permissions.
And if you wish to give full access to your files by all users on the system you need to give 777 permissions
Filename extension
Usually three or four letters that follow a period after the filename. They designate the file type. There are hundreds in existence, and new ones frequently being invented. Examples are: .txt (text file), .gif, jpeg, bmp, exe, com, bat, ini, conf
Filtering
A process for screening network traffic for certain characteristics, such as source address, destination address, or protocol, and determining whether to forward or discard that traffic based on the established criteria. It is used in firewalls in order to decide if the traffic is to be forwarded or rejected. It is the network security basics.
Finger
An program for «locating» people on computers – either one’s own or another. finger is also sometimes used to give access to non-personal information, but the most common use is to see if a person has an account at a particular Internet site and/or whether they are presently logged in. Some sites do not allow outside finger requests, but many do.
Firewall
It is either a software or a hardware device that is used to protect internal network or even a single computer from attacks and unauthorized access.
Frame Relay
Frame Relay is a network technology. It is a communication interface that provides high-speed packet transmission with minimum delay and efficient use of bandwidth. It assumes that all connections are reliable and does not have error detection or control which helps to speed up the protocol.
FrontPage Extensions
A set of programs installed on a web hosting server which enable users of Microsoft FrontPage to use its special components (called Web Bots). The extensions can be installed for Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) and on other Windows (usually Windows NT) and UNIX web hosting servers.
FTP
File Transfer Protocol. A common method for downloading and uploading files to a web hosting server. Popular FTP programs are CuteFTP, SmartFTP, WS_FTP. More of the the contemporary Internet browsers support FTP transfer as well.
FYI
Chat acronym «For Your Information»