1.1 Glossary

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This document uses the following terms:

ASCII: The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is an 8-bit character-encoding scheme based on the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that work with text. ASCII refers to a single 8-bit ASCII character or an array of 8-bit ASCII characters with the high bit of each character set to zero.

client: A computer on which the remote procedure call (RPC) client is executing.

device driver: The software that the system uses to communicate with a device such as a display, printer, mouse, or communications adapter. An abstraction layer that restricts access of applications to various hardware devices on a given computer system. It is often referred to simply as a "driver".

file system (device) driver: A software abstraction layer that restricts access of applications to the nonvolatile storage hardware on a given computer system.

file system control (FSCTL): A command issued to a file system to alter or query the behavior of the file system and/or set or query metadata that is associated with a particular file or with the file system itself.

protocol data unit (PDU): Information that is delivered as a unit among peer entities of a network and that can contain control information, address information, or data. For more information on remote procedure call (RPC)-specific PDUs, see [C706] section 12.

server: A computer on which the remote procedure call (RPC) server is executing.

Server Message Block (SMB): A protocol that is used to request file and print services from server systems over a network. The SMB protocol extends the CIFS protocol with additional security, file, and disk management support. For more information, see [CIFS] and [MS-SMB].

static virtual channel: A static transport used for lossless communication between a client component and a server component over a main data connection, as specified in [MS-RDPBCGR].

Unicode character: Unless otherwise specified, a 16-bit UTF-16 code unit.

Unicode string: A Unicode 8-bit string is an ordered sequence of 8-bit units, a Unicode 16-bit string is an ordered sequence of 16-bit code units, and a Unicode 32-bit string is an ordered sequence of 32-bit code units. In some cases, it could be acceptable not to terminate with a terminating null character. Unless otherwise specified, all Unicode strings follow the UTF-16LE encoding scheme with no Byte Order Mark (BOM).

MAY, SHOULD, MUST, SHOULD NOT, MUST NOT: These terms (in all caps) are used as defined in [RFC2119]. All statements of optional behavior use either MAY, SHOULD, or SHOULD NOT.