NAS @ HOME glossary of terms

origin: WikiPedia

SAMBA
An open source implementation of the SMB file sharing protocol that provides file and print services to SMB/CIFS clients. Samba allows a non-Windows server to communicate with the same networking protocol as the Windows products. Samba was originally developed for Unix but can now run on #Linux, FreeBSD and other Unix variants. It is freely available under the GNU General Public License. The name Samba is a variant of SMB, the protocol from which it stems. As of version 3, samba not only provides file and print services for various Microsoft Windows clients but can also integrate with a Windows Server domain, either as a Primary Domain Controller (PDC) or as a Domain Member. It can also be part of an Active Directory domain.

CIFS
Server message block (SMB) is a network protocol mainly applied to share files, printers, serial ports, and miscellaneous communications between nodes on a network. It is mainly used by Microsoft Windows equipped computers.

FTP
The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a software standard for transferring computer files between machines with widely different operating systems. It belongs to the application layer of the Internet protocol suite.
NFS
Network File System (NFS) is a protocol originally developed by Sun Microsystems in 1984 and defined in RFCs 1094, 1813, (3010) and 3530, as a file system which allows a computer to access files over a network as easily as if they were on its local disks.

RSYNC
rsync is a computer program which synchronises files and directories from one location to another while minimizing data transfer using delta encoding when appropriate. An important feature of rsync not found in most similar programs/protocols is that the mirroring takes place with only one transmission in each direction.