What are these "servers"?
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Got server? |
When talking about "higher level" computing, the most frequent question asked to me in particular is "What are servers?" Servers can be just about anything that serves, but the most basic of basic example is a web page request. Note you are the client right now. A client, much like anyone in the real world demand service, and demand it fast! The client machine sends a request to an IP (Internet Protocol) address, the theoretical "street" address of a computer. A request is picked up on the server for an action to be executed, finally the action is executed, and the client receives something. Simple enough so far right? |
| Amplify that request to thousands requesting something, and remember they still want their service now! This means that there is going to have to be quite a beefy machine to cover everything to cover so many requests to keep the clients satisfied. In this brief (very, very brief) analysis of server, I shall refrain from going into the extremely technical introduction as this is a mere school website, and after I say something like "RAID 5 on SCSI's with a quad Opteron setup is going to be the best bang for the buck with that new Linux distro CVS database of yours for your team of developers scattered across a broken Level 3 network" will lead to confusion. So simply, that server to the right is a typical 2U server with a dual processor setup, something to handle the heavy client traffic. And since it is rackmountable, it is very space efficient. A standard industry cabinet is 42U. Thusly 21 2U units could be stuffed in; or if you had 1U, 42 1U units could be stuffed in, and so on and so forth... |  |
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Integrated into many of these small boxes are embedded computers. Thus they can be classified as a server due to a neat little thing called DHCP. DHCP servers automatically assign an IP address to a machine, thusly you don't have to fill in this information yourself. Heck, many people nowadays don't even know they have an IP and DNS information on their machine courtesy of this technology. This so far may sound lazy to have this server, but imagine assigning custom information to every machine in Bethel Park School District, by hand! Oy! Another server aspect of routers is DNS servers. This allows interconnection of machines on the LAN by knowing only the names, and more complex subnets (oh joy!) |
| Now for perhaps the biggest feature of this page, "Why do you care frankly about servers anyway?" Well, without servers and dedicated admins to manage them, there would be no internet. Heck, there would be no intranets. With new VOIP (Voice over IP) Technology, cell phones would not exist as their voice communication is synchronized this way. Imagine banks everywhere with even slower check processing times than before. Clearly a client and server share a close relationship. |
Reasons to care |
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About Servers |
Now what if on the other side of this, nobody had clients, and there were only server grade systems available? Well this was true of the past, jump to the year of 1969. UNIX was born. UNIX is the mother of every operating system today, and was made originally for large mainframe computers. Mainframe servers are now usually applied to industrial purposes. What could be considered a huge leap for the servers was the making of the small computers in our homes and businesses. Once the processors, RAM, and hard drives became smaller, distributed systems of thousands of nodes could be made allowing for even more innovation in the large supercomputers, and advanced servers. Some who read this will correct me and say "What about terminals at the mainframes?' And I say, this is an introductory site at a middle school, and being respective of the audience, this will suffice for an explanation. |
Gallery of my various in-house servers
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A nice little "homebrew" server. This particular machine was the original router I used on my home network for many months. It did quite an impressive job. Linux was the choice of operating system on this machine for its qualities. A) I was able to find a distro (term for particular Linux O/S, Linux itself is nothing more than a kernel written by Linus Torvalds) that ran off of a floppy (no hard drive, or cd drive needed, big perk for a machine that's just going to be a router 24/7. B) It is definitely one of the most stable operating systems on earth. C) Its free and open source, costs nothing! This router was in its active service restarted 3-4 times total over 8-10 months, 2 of which in the first week! |
| Yes, this box was also a server. As this is a middle school, I would call it safe to assume a few have heard of a video game called "Counterstrike," a mod for Half-Life that pretty much became more popular than Half-Life itself. For a couple of months I hosted a 16 man server off of this machine. Never know what you are playing on... |  |
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This "ugly little duckling" serves as just an extra network file server that aids in occasional backups, and copying important hard disk files from other machines before "nuking" the disks and repairing a system from time to time. This machine runs on an operating system called NetBSD. NetBSD probably runs on anything except a piece of tofu (that is sarcasm of course). This basic barebones server has a very cheap RAID system (Random Array of Inexpensive Disks), more precisely, I stuffed many disks into this machine, and made them act as one essentially. This machine goes down only for power outages. BSD is an acronym which stands for Berkeley Software Distribution, which is the most reliable system on earth IMO. Uptimes are measured in years on them. I say BSD for there are many versions besides NetBSD including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and DragonflyBSD. |
