IT Standards

Mike Cowlishaw, IBM Fellow, presented "Changing the Way Computers Compute" at the Hillgang user group meeting on 24 April 2008. This presentation explains the need for hardware-accelerated binary decimal formats and the emerging IEEE standards in this area.

The Technical Reference FAQ provides commonly-needed technical reference information about hardware, software, and IT standards, as well as web links to items in these categories. This FAQ was created mainly for the convenience of Sine Nomine Associates' staff, but there was no reason not to share with others.

Adam Thornton continues his series on Do-It-Yourself Linux with an article on installing a mail transport system. From Technical Support Magazine (January 2003, PDF)

This document (ASCII text) provides the official listing of well-known port numbers for IP network services. These numbers define how TCP/IP and UDP/IP network servers and clients are to be configured in a standard system.

The Private Enterprise Numbers (PENs) are assigned by the Internet Assigned Number Authority (http://www.iana.org/) primarily for use as object identifiers (OIDs) in the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and related standards. They are also used to create unique OID arches for locally-defined schema items in LDAP and X.500 directories.

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is, technically, a protocol for connecting to an enterprise directory. In recent years, the original X.500 standard has been largely supplanted by LDAP protocol servers that also implement the back-end data repository, so "LDAP" has become practically synonymous with "directory." This page provides commonly-needed reference information and links to LDAP-related standards.

Much of the free software provided on this web site is released under the GNU General Public License. This page is a copy of that license.