Label
An element of a domain name. No label can be longer then 63 characters. Labels are made up of letters, numbers and hyphens, but may not start with hyphens. Labels in a domain name are separated from each other by a period. Labels are case insensitive. Example : label.domain-name-here.com

Lame delegation
Same as Lame Server.

Lame Server
When an NS record points to an incorrect host. This can be caused by: 1. A zone is delegated to a server that has not been properly configured to be authoritative for the zone. 2. A server that is authoritative for the zone has an NS record that points to another that is not authoritative for the zone. This will cause resolvers to direct queries to servers that will not respond authoritatively, if at all. This causes unnecessary network traffic and extra work for servers.

LAN - Local Area Network
A network of devices (computers, printers, hubs) occupying a small area. Usually LANs do not span more than one building. LANs are very fast compared to WANs.

LAN modem
A LAN Modem is used to connect multiple computers to some other network (eg. ISP) over a phone line. It has the hub functionality built in.

Leased line
A dedicated communication line. User is charged a flat fee instead of being billed per minute of usage.

Line provisioning
It is the process of configuring the ISDN line by the service provider to suit user's particular needs and to assure hardware compatibility. It's due to the fact that ISDN is not completely standardized.

Link
Another name for a connection. Sometimes refers to a physical line.

Linux
A free UNIX-like operating system developed by Linus Torvalds. Linux and FreeBSD are very often used by hosting companies as their operating systems.

Live chat
This has become popular over the past couple years as a support and sales tool where the user can instant message from right in the web browser. These programs are web based and most commonly in php.

Load Balancing
Distributing data across a network of servers in order to ensure that a single Web server does not get overloaded with work, thereby affecting performance or even causing the server to crash.

LOC Record
Location Record. Experimental, proposed in 1996. Informational, not functional. Used to give latitude and longitude, in degrees minutes and seconds, altitude in meters, and dimensions (in terms of meters) of a host.

Log file
A file maintained on a server in which details of all file accesses are stored. Analysing log files can be a powerful way to find out about a web site's visitors, where they come from and which queries are used to access a site. Best viewed with a program such as Webalizer.

Login
An alias for an individual that is used for identification and authentication when accessing a computer system. Usually it is a sequence of characters and digits.

Lossless
A compression scheme is loseless when decompressed file is exactly the same as the original. This is needed for compressing executable programs and data files.

Lossy
A lossy compression allows for the quality of the compressed data to be diminished after decompression. It is suitable for audio, video and image compression.

LZW compression
Lempel Ziv Welch compression - a popular compression algorithm.