What is a server?
In: Engineering
A server is a human being who is younger in age or has made poor life decisions. They are a middle man in the process of communicating what you would like to eat and what the chef has available. Most servers are alcoholics or on cocaine and should be tipped well for the hard work and long hours they put in.
A server is a computer that services requests from other computers, referred to as clients. Those requests could be to send a particular webpage back to the client, to perform a calculation, to retrieve or store some data in a database, whatever.
A server is someone who serves legal notices to appear for people subpoenaed for court trials or depositions or legal paperwork that requires proof of delivery such as eviction notices.
Assuming you’re referring to computers:
In general, a computer is a computer. They can do lots of things. It all depends on what software you program into them.
One of those things computers can do is talk to other computers. The way this usually works is one computer will wrap up a message to the other computer and ask for a resource from it. It might ask, “May I have the file at `www.reddit.com`?”, for example. The other computer presumably has software that is sitting around, listening for these kinds of requests. When it gets one, it will determine what that first computer wants, whether it is allowed to see it, and if so, *serves* that request to it. The second computer is a *server* in this case.
A server is any computer running software that sits around and listens for requests like this. Or, depending on who you ask, the instance of software that’s doing the listening is the server. A “virtual” server.
Often, a computer acting as a server needs to handle a *lot* of requests. More requests than any old computer running server software can normally handle. So, special computers are made that are designed *specifically* to be servers. They’re optimized to run server software exclusively. These computers themselves are also often just called “servers”. When you hear of a “server farm”, or a “server room”, chances are it’s a room full of these special computers sitting on a rack in a big cooled room.
But the thing to remember is that, at the end of the day, a computer is a computer. Usually. These servers can just as well behave like a personal computer and run any software a computer like yours (assuming you have one) can run, though it would be insanely overkill to use it that way. On the flipside, your computer could probably run whatever software that server is running, but probably not as efficiently. It’s all a matter of how they’re used.
Your computer acted as a *client* when you sent your question to Reddit. Reddit’s *server* computer stored the question. Then I sent a request from my client computer to display your message, and the server sent your message back to me. Now I’m about to ask the server to display this answer.
Clients ask servers to do things.
A server when discussing computers and networks is a system that shares information with other systems.
A server can be a computer or software. My home computer runs web server software. I have a server at work that runs software so that it has virtual servers on it. One of those servers can run a DNS server, mail server, and web server.
A computer that accessed a server is a client. Although servers can be clients of each other and clients can share info with each other.
A server is a computer which has a program which answers messages from other computers.
You want to go to Reddit, so your computer looks up the address of one of Reddit’s servers and sends it a message (think of a virtual postcard) saying “Hey Mr Reddit Server, can you tell me what’s on the front page today?”
And it sends one back saying “Hey Mr Someone’s Computer, there’s a bunch of stuff about coronavirus and Trump, …..”
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