1. A program which provides some service to other (
client)
programs. The connection between client and
server is
normally by means of
message passing, often over a
network, and uses some
protocol to encode the client's
requests and the server's responses. The
server may run
continuously (as a
daemon), waiting for requests to arrive
or it may be invoked by some higher level daemon which
controls a number of specific
servers (
inetd on
Unix).
There are many
servers associated with the
Internet, such as
those for
HTTP,
Network File System, {Network Information
Service} (NIS),
Domain Name System (DNS),
FTP,
news,
finger,
Network Time Protocol. On Unix, a long list can
be found in /etc/services or in the
NIS database "services".
See
client-server.
2. A computer which provides some service for other computers
connected to it via a network. The most common example is a
file server which has a local disk and services requests
from remote clients to read and write files on that disk,
often using
Sun's
Network File System (NFS)
protocol or
Novell Netware on
PCs. Another common example is a {web
server}.
[
Jargon File]
(2003-12-29)