Many kinds of clients and servers

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Skills: none

IT concepts: servers that serve other computers, servers in devices

Where does this topic fit?

• Internet concepts– Applications– Technology– Implications

• Internet skills– Application development– Content creation

Retrieving Web pages is only one client-server application.

There is a wide variety of others.

Where is the server in this picture?

The print server

A computer inside

Connected to a local area network

Programmed to offer a service

Printing pages is the service

The program never changes – it is in read only memory

Servers can interact with the physical world as well as the virtual world.

Servers are often called by programs rather than people

This page came from an Amazon server.

Amazon retrieved this information from a UPS server.

A few questions

If a vending machine were connected to the Internet, what sort of service might it provide to the owner of the machine or a potential customer?

Network servers offer a great variety of services to users and to other computers.

• Printing pages• Backing up and retrieving stored files• Returning the exact time of day• Processing credit card transactions• Looking up words in a dictionary• Retrieving data from a database• Turning machines or appliances on or off• Converting the text on a page to an audio speech file• Converting a PDF file to Word format and vice versa• Sending and receiving email• Transferring files from one computer to another

Can you add to this list?

Would the computer in the print server be more likely to run Windows or some other operating system?

Would the computer in the print server need to run TCP/IP software?

Many kinds of clients and servers

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Skills: none

IT concepts: servers that serve other computers, servers in devices