Text 5142, 89 rader
Skriven 2005-03-18 00:04:00 av Alan Zisman (1:106/2000.0)
   Kommentar till text 5095 av CHARLES ANGELICH (1:123/140)
Ärende: Re: lan
===============
-=> CHARLES ANGELICH wrote to ALAN ZISMAN <=-

 
 CA> 'Server', to me, means a machine executing server software that
 CA> is unable to function as a client while executing that
 CA> software. True a 'server' serves but 'sharing' is not
 CA> 'serving'. Sharing implies that the machine can become a client
 CA> at any time. A server often has no monitor attached and some
 CA> have no keyboard since a server _only_ serves it does not
 CA> require human access components.

There are a lot of situations that are in a gray-area here... I know several
people who are running web-serving software on the same system that they use
for graphics editing, keeping their books, word processing, etc.

The system is a server connected to the Internet, but it's also a workstation.

 CA> I do get your point that only two machines are 'sharing' but a
 CA> server can _only_ serve up files and cannot grab files from the
 CA> rest of the network. In this case, the two machine _could_ with
 CA> minor changes to the configurations.

Again, because all Windows versions include the possibilty of turning on
file-sharing, I could sit at a network server (running say Windows 2000 Server)
and still access files sitting on a workstation that had file-sharing enabled--
or print to a printer connected to a workstation with print-sharing turned on.
It's not as black and white as you seem to be imagining... at least not in the
real world of office workgroups that may be fuzzing the boundaries.

 AZ> As I said above, one can define the term 'server' in a
 AZ> variety of ways. In my school district, there has,
 AZ> historically, been some politics around this-- for a couple
 AZ> of years, the district IT department was pushing what it
 AZ> called a 'Local Area Network Initiative' aiming to put
 AZ> Novell servers into elementary schools, serving an
 AZ> expensive collection of (in my opinion poorly designed) IBM
 AZ> educational software. I opposed having my school buy in
 AZ> (schools had to put up their own money to buy into this
 AZ> program), noting that we already had a local area network.
 AZ> The IT administrator pooh-poohed my network, since as a
 AZ> peer-to-peer network, it wasn't a 'real' LAN... regardless
 AZ> of whether it worked for us (and was affordable by us). The
 AZ> whole experience left me bitter and twisted around the
 AZ> question of what's a 'real' network, however.

 CA> I'm sorry that the school's IT department has not been
 CA> appreciative of your efforts to save the schools some money.
 CA> Bureaucracies can be unrewarding to have to deal with. :-(

 CA> I'm only trying to define terms here. I have no axe to grind as
 CA> to what constitutes a _real_ network or what networking
 CA> software is better than the other.

I do appreciate that you aren't attacking my use of peer-to-peer... and in a
situation where money was not an object, I might happily agree that buying
'real' server hardware with a 'real' server operating system would offer better
performance and stability than my home-made setup. 


 AZ>> A Linux installation can be used either as a workstation
 AZ>> or a server; the difference is what optional programs are
 AZ>> installed (Apache for web serving, for instance).

 CA>> This would also be true for Windows. I don't see a
 CA>> difference here?

The difference is that MS sells separate Windows Server OS versions,charges for
client licenses to connect to a Windows server (beyond a minimum number of
licenses included with the base server license) and limits the number of
clients that can connect to non-server versions of WinNT/2000/XP. So the
differences between Windows and Linux in these regards are licensing and cost
issues more than they are purely technical.

 CA> You mention of Apache for web serving and the difference being
 CA> what optional programs are installed is where I am drowning in
 CA> terminology. For me clients are _always_ clients while
 CA> executing client software and servers are _always_ servers when
 CA> executing server software. From this perspective P2P is not a
 CA> true 'network' (no servers) and is only sharing resources
 CA> (similar to bittorrent - no servers per se).

See above... if I install webserver or ftp server or email server software on
my home computer, it is providing specific server services, while continuing to
act as a workstation at the same time.

 
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