SAP (Novell)
acronymnetworking
Stands for: Service Advertising Protocol (Novell NetWare)
NetWare's Service Advertising Protocol - how servers announced 'here I am, and here's what I offer' across an IPX network.
SAP let file servers, print servers, and other NetWare services broadcast their existence and type so clients could find them without central configuration. Convenient at small scale, its periodic broadcasts became a notorious scaling problem on large IPX internetworks - routers had to carry ever-growing SAP tables, and 'SAP storms' were a real operational headache. It is a clean cautionary tale in service discovery that predates today's DNS-based approaches.
Also known as: novell sap, service advertising protocol, sap protocol, netware sap