Introduction to Servers

hello again as you know I am Eli the computer guy today's class is introduction to servers so so most people when they first start learning about servers they normally go through some kind of certification track or they take a class that is very specific on servers like I started out with the the mcse the Microsoft Certified systems engineer track so when I learn servers all I really learned was Microsoft servers they talked about Mac servers like a little bit it talked almost nothing about Linux they put Novell in there because they had to but they didn't they didn't teach us about servers in general they taught us very specifically about Windows servers and Windows servers only well as we are going into the server track I want to give you a broader foundation on understanding how servers work so in this class today we are going to talk about a couple specific products but we're going to talk more about the general idea of servers what servers do in the network what they provide to the clients on the network and things that you need to think about if you're thinking about installing or if you have to maintain a server so today's class on introduction to servers again this is not specific we're going to talk a little bit about Windows servers a little bit about Linux servers we're going to mention that there's Mac servers out there but we're not going to focus on those this class is going to just be the overall idea of what is a server why is it useful and what do you do with it if you have one so so give me a couple minutes I'll be back and what we'll get into this class now the first thing that that we have to do when we're talking about servers is we have to define what a server is so the server is not simply you know if it has a server in the name you know Windows 2008 server that is a server but that's not the only thing that can be a server basically all all the server is all a server is this is nothing to be nervous about all the server is it is it's a computer on a network that provides services to other computers on the network so a file server is a computer on the network that has files in it that other people can get to a print server on the network is a computer with a printer attached that that can share out that printer to other computers on the network so if somebody can print press print on one computer and it will print out on another computer a web server is simply a computer with special software installed on it that allows that computer to present websites to people going to to that that computer so all all the server is is a computer on the network that provides services to other computers now this might be Windows 2008 server windows 2003 server Ubuntu server Red Hat Linux Enterprise Server Edition it can be that or it can also be a windows xp home edition computer that simply has a shared folder that everybody can access and grab files so one of the big things that I need want to get through your head is that all the server is is a computer on the network that provides services to other computers on the network many people waste a lot of their own money and a lot of other people's money because when they go oh I need a file server let's say they have a little office and they have five people in that office and they go oh I need a file server well they run out and they spend $4,000 an enterprise-class Windows 2008 server and they can now share out the files to everybody in the office and they go WOW bonus I now have a file server well they did not need a full Windows 2008 server in order to share out a few files on the network they could have used like I say windows xp home edition to share out files in network and it would have been a lot less expensive so so the main thing when we define server is that certain to be a server the computer doesn't have to have server in the name of the operating system all the computer does to have to be a server is it has to provide services to other computers on the network so now that we've defined what a server is so a server is something is a computer on the network that provides services to clients on a network we have to to kind of differentiate between servers and servers what do I mean by that well in the real world you basically have two different types of servers you have the little file server sitting in an office with five people that people either backup files to or they get something off of every once in a while it's it is a server it is useful people share information but if the the server crashes or something goes a little hinky um nobody's really going to lose their mind over a nobody's gonna fire river then you have servers servers real servers um are computers that have to be on 24 hours a day seven days a week and if they stop functioning ever for any reason everything just goes to absolute hell like like with this company everyman IT comm our web servers our media servers have to be online 24 hours a day they rarely even get rebooted they get rebooted maybe once a month uh more likely once every two or three months these things have to be rock-solid stable if anything happens they have to be able to survive small problems so if there's a small problem in the operating system or the hardware they have to be able to survive that and keep going because if something fails well then the entire business just just goes away so we've defined server as providing services for four clients on the network but then what you what you have to think about is you do have two very very different types of servers you have the server like I say that deals with five people in an office it has a printer connected to it it has some shared files you know again if it dies it's sad you know we shut it's here or whatever but but nobody's going to lose their / versus servers these are these are these are these are the really cool things that everybody wants to work on servers they have to be up 24 hours a day seven days a week and so when most people talk about servers when you discuss servers with most people these are the types of servers that they're going to talk be talking about they're going to be talking about rock solid pieces of equipment that basically should never fail so so just keep that in mind there are two different types of servers in the world and we're going to go into that in these next two sections when we talk about the server operating systems and then server hardware so let's take a moment to talk about server operating systems as we said before the little Windows XP home computer can be a server but the issue with that little xp home computer is it's not designed to be on 24 hours a day seven days a week to never be rebooted to never really need to prepares it's built to you know to be a little computer you can either do some more processing or play video games on well Microsoft and all the other companies out there on top of creating desktop operating system operating systems they also create server operating systems server operating systems are more robust more stable and you generally more secure than the desktop operating systems so if you're thinking you know why don't I use that Windows XP home computer because that's going to be a lot less expensive than buying a full-fledged Windows 2008 server it really depends on what you need that server for if you need to to you know share files to five or ten people on an office a little Windows XP computer would be fine for you Windows 2008 servers or any servers whether they're Linux or Mac OS actually has a full server they are made to be much more robust and to deal with many more incoming connections than the little home desktop computers imagine and realize that that real server operating systems like if you're dealing with Windows 2008 server and you're using it for what's called an Active Directory server so people actually log into it and they gain resources to the network one single Windows 2008 server can support up to 10,000 users so that that server software is much more robust and can deal with far more users and far more issues than the little desktop operating system well so the reason people use the server operating systems versus the desktop operating systems is again they can scale up they they can deal with far more users that desktop computer camp one of the things you have to realize when you're dealing with with server operating systems is a lot of times they can seem much more complicated than desktop computers because they actually don't come with as many of the nice little friendly user tools that desktop computers come with since you're new with servers something to think about is that every time you put a piece of software or put a piece of functionality onto a computer into the operating system not only do you get that extra functionality but you also get possible extra flaws bugs and defects that hackers can use to compromise that system so when you install flash on to your computer you like it because you can you can watch videos you can watch it this video because you have Flash installed but that flash actually has security holes that hackers can use to take over the computer so when the vendors create server operating systems they don't put in as many of those nice little features into the server operating systems because they want to make the server operating systems more secure so if you're dealing with a Windows 2000 a server when you go into it you're going to notice that it's it's much more difficult to get around and administer that server then it is a normal Windows desktop computer because there's not as many nice fancy little flashy wizards and easy to do stuff if you use Linux like if you decide to use a bun to Linux as a sirum you'll notice if you download and install the desktop version of Ubuntu Linux you get a nice little graphical interface you can go in you can left-click you can right-click and you can do all the stuff that you think of when you use a computer if you download the server software after it reboots you're going to be seeing something that looks like a DOS prompt and there's just gonna be a little cursor that's blinking at you and it will only do whatever it is you type into it to tell it to do so what what why they do that is because all those fancy little ethics that that make the server easier to use also create security holes so if you want a very secure Linux web server you don't want all the graphical stuff you don't want Firefox installed you you don't even you don't even want the GUI you don't want cursors and buttons and all that you just want that little that little dots prompt so you can type in and tell it exactly what you want it to do and that's that's all we'll do so when you're dealing with the server operating systems although in many ways they can be much more sophisticated or are much more sophisticated than the desktop computers they're not necessarily as user friendly so you really have to understand what you're doing before you you start going in there and starting to mess with stuff because if you do if you do something stupid it can be much more difficult to get back to where you came from the last part when you're dealing with server software so we've talked about the server operating systems server operating systems when you go to buy software let's say backup software or utility software one thing to just to realize to know is that software is going to be much more expensive than the normal comparable desktop versions so in when I had the repair shop we used a Cronus for our backup solution whether it was desktop computers or servers well the the Acronis for a desktop computer was anywhere between fifty to a hundred dollars depending on what what Edition we bought the backup software for the servers that we installed it seems like it's the exact same thing but for whatever reason that was six to seven hundred dollars so this is something to realize when you're deciding between using a desktop operating system as a server or server operating system as a server is this software for that server operating system is going to be more expensive again we used a disk management you know partitioning software to enlarge or shrink partitions on a desktop computer cost fifty dollars on foreign server it cost six hundred dollars basically the same functionality one was for a server one was for desktop computer ten times the cost so we've kind of talked about the server operating systems remember any computer that provides a service on the network is technically a server but then you have two types of servers the server that supports five users you know it's as low computer has couple files on it has a printer and those servers servers support up to 10,000 users at a time are much more robust are expected to never be rebooted etc when you're looking to install a server for yourself or your client really think about what you need because again like I say that a little Windows XP computer is fine for five people is very inexpensive the server that Windows 2008 server is very robust but very expensive like I say even the backup software $600 just for one piece of software so that that's a brief introduction on that on what server operating systems are now let's go into we're going to talk about server hardware so we just talked about server operating systems so so server operating systems Windows 2008 server Ubuntu Server edition anything like that those are operating systems that are built to be on servers that are going to be very robust very tough more secure except well the same is true of server hardware so you can use any hardware to create a server you can go out to Best Buy and you can buy the crappiest little a machine you can throw it on the network and you can share out files and you can use that fine as a file server or whatever type of server you need you don't need need specialized hardware for servers but just like with the server operating systems they do make a special hardware for servers and and if you need your server to be up 24 hours a day seven days a week et cetera you should really think about using real server hardware the the first piece of server hardware that you probably know is is server processors so in Intel these are called Xeon processors basically the reason you want to use is Eon processor is that processor is built for dealing with the tasks that servers normally deal with so if you want a really fast a video game machine right now you probably buy an Intel i7 quad-core processor and that is built for video games that will be very good for video games well what you need in a server computer is not the same as what you need in a video game computer so you would go out and you would buy a xeon processor these processors just are you're very good at just chugging through and just dealing with data and doing the stuff that servers do so that this the first thing is the xeon processor again you don't need it but it is better if you have a special using a server the next thing when you're dealing with a server is something called redundant power supplies so what the redundant power supplies are is within the normal form factor for power supply they can fit anywhere between two to three power supplies in there and so if one of the power supplies fails the other two are still active and the computer stays on so imagine if dust gets blown in or just a capacitor blows out any of the normal stuff if one of those power supplies dies the computer is still on it's completely still functional most of these redundant power supplies are hot swappable so you can actually if one of those powers though the redundant power supplies fails you can pull it out you can order a new one and just plug it in and go on your way you do not have to reboot the system that's that's hot swappable again almost all of these are redundant power supplies allow you do hot swap in different power modules and normally you can have anywhere between two to three modules so you can you can have up to two basically two power supplies fail so that's what the redundant power supplies do is they allow one power supply to fail but the computer stays on with the power supplies in most servers will also hear of something called raid 3 is redundant array of inexpensive disks we actually have a whole class on array it's called intro to raid if you want to take a look at it basically what raid does is it allows you to combine multiple physical discs into one logical disk so most of the time with if you have a server you will either have something called disk striking with parity or disk mirroring disk mirroring is where you have two hard drives in the machine that are identical so one piece of data gets put on one one piece of data puts put on the other one puts the another piece of data gets put on one another piece of data gets put on the other if one of these hard drives fails the computer stays running because you have two identical hard drives these hard drives are again what is called hot swappable so if one hard drive fails you pull out the drive that failed you plug in a brand new hard drive it does something the computer does something called it rebuilds the array and then you go back to being redundant so if one hard drive fails the computer stays up you pull out the bad hard drive you put the new hard drive in everything stays running you never turn the computer off this is all while the computer is still on raid 5 is where you can put combined anywhere between 332 disks into one logical harddrive and what happens is it it stripes the data across all the hard drives that you have in that raid and then it has one hard drive one hard drive that's used for parody basically to make this easy if you have five hard drives it stripes the data along all those hard drives and uses one of the hard drives it's kind of like a recovery drive so if any single hard drive in that raid fails you can pull that bad hard drive out the computer still seems functional you put the new hard drive in it does something call rebuilding the array and you just go on your life the computer or the server never shuts down so this is this is raid the last thing that you see in service is it's called ECC Ram this is error checking something Ram what this is is most Ram that you put into your computer I like you to a normal desktop computer and frankly what I put in my servers ECC Ram is incredibly expensive and I don't see the purpose but we're going to tell you about what this does is when you normally boot up your computer your computer normally boots up and it just accepts the RAM it's in there for what it is and you go on with your life ECC Ram actually runs a check it runs a self test of that Ram to make sure that the RAM is this functioning properly and if it's not it does a couple of Corrections this means that you don't have to worry about having any bad Ram because bad Ram if you're if you're using a desktop computer if you're just doing you know PowerPoint presentations in Word it's probably never going to affect you but remember real servers that you know have a thousand if you have a web server that has a thousand visitors an hour or if you know something that's really crunching a lot of information if you have anything bad really it can can start to to cause massive cough about consequences you know a little snowball turns into a big boulder so of the error-checking Ram make sure that the Ram is perfect and if it's not it does some low corrections in there to make sure that it won't affect the the server when it's online again this is nice because it make sure your RAM is perfect and make sure you don't have any small problems that snowball and bigger problems but you're going to spend three to four times as much on you call on your RAM when you decide to use it ECC Ram out of all this stuff is the thing I am least worried about none of my servers use it maybe when I'm maybe when every man I to.com has has thousands and thousands and thousands people hitting it per hour we'll worry about it but this is something that realistically unless unless you really need really just a perfect perfect system you don't need ECC right so we talked about the xeon processors these are basically just processors designed for servers for server applications we've talked about the redundant power supplies so the redundant power supplies mean that one of those power modules fails the computer still stays on and running you can replace the one module put a new module in and keep going we talked about raid that's where you can buy multiple physical disks into one logical disk if any one of those hard drives fails you can pull out the hard drive put a new one in and the computer does something called rebuilding your Ray and it just basically fixes it we have an entire class on raid called intro to raid if you want to learn more about Ray and then finally we talked about ECC Ram again this is RAM that does a self-test of itself and corrects problems if there are problems very very good if you need the absolute most robust server in the world but again it's gonna cost you a foolish amount of money I don't use it but it's kind of your decision on that ECC Ram so so now that we talked about what a server is you know defining different types of servers a little server and the server we've talked about server operating systems and hardware now let's go into talking about the different types of service what do you use servers for so now that we've gone over the basics of what servers are let's start talking about what servers actually do for you what do they do for the network the first thing that you have to realize when we start talking about all these possible functions of servers whether its file server FTP server web server database server Terminal Services server mail server etc is these are simply server pieces of software just like Word or Excel or PowerPoint on your computer so one server one one physical computer with one the server operating system can provide multiple server functions so don't don't think that that one computer can only do one thing it's like your desktop computer you know your desktop computer can have Photoshop and Word and Firefox and all these other things a server can be a mail server and an FTP server and an Active Directory server all at one time in this next little bit I'm going to break down all these separate server services into the two into their own parts and talk about what these these individual components can do but I don't want you to think that you have to have a physical computer for each one of these these components they can all be on one one computer windows when you buy a Windows 2008 server most of this this functionality is already built into it so these pieces of software are already built into and included in the operating system that you get so when you get in Windows 2008 server not only do you get the server operating system but if the file server is already built in the web server so if you wanted to have a website iis it's called internet and information server is already built-in ftp servers already built in Terminal Services server is already built in Active Directory server is already built in so if you get a Windows 2008 server most of the server functionality that you will ever use is already built in to that server if you are using Linux you have to install all these different pieces of server software individually so when you when you create your bun to server when you start it up for the first time it's not going to do a lot you have to install and setup the FTP server you have to setup the Apache web server you have to setup the database server that stuff is not already included in the software and again if you don't need a server server you know server that's going to deal with a thousand or 10,000 people you're just going to use a little Windows XP computer there is software that you can buy to install that little Windows XP computer so that it can have a lot of the server functionality so if you want a web a fully functional web server on a Windows XP home computer you can download for free something called Apache web server and this makes that little Windows XP desktop computer a full web server where you can run a real website off or you can install my sequel database so it can be a database server you can install something called FileZilla server so it becomes a full-fledged ftp file server so what I want you to realize as we go and do all these different things that servers can do is that all these functions can be on one box so you can have one physical server that does all of these things if you buy Windows 2008 server operating system most of this functionalities already built into it basically you just have to turn it on if you're using Linux you're probably gonna have to install all the functionality that you wanted to do and if you're using one of the desktop operating systems Windows XP Windows 7 Windows Vista a lot of the functionality you can give it a lot of the functionality by installing additional pieces of software onto it like I say FileZilla FTP server if you wanted to use as an FTP server or a Patrick to to turn a Windows Vista computer into a full-fledged web server so all the all the things we're going to talk about is basically software think of it as like Word and Excel and PowerPoint but the server variety so so with that let's let's go in and talk about the different things that servers can do now one of the functions that most people are most familiar with are the security functions that a server can provide for your network if you've if you've ever gone to a university if you've ever worked in a major corporation when you sit down to your computer you have to log in to the computer and not only do you log into the computer but you actually log into the network so there is a server on the network that allows you access to the network and this is something called an authentication server now in the windows world they use something called Active Directory so you have an Active Directory server basically you'll when you sit down to log in to to the network your username your password goes up to that Active Directory server that actor protected Active Directory server make sure everything is ok and then it gives you something called an access control key digitally this access control key says what permissions you have to do things on the network so basically you log in it gives you this key and then you can then get into the files and folders that you're supposed to gain access to and you're not allowed to get into the files and folders you're not allowed access to so when Windows this is called Active Directory and this is provided by something called domain controllers back in the day back with Windows NT there used to be something called primary date domain controllers and backup domain controllers nowadays there are just domain controllers or something through something called replication we'll talk about in a different class you just you go to any one of these domain controller servers you give it the username and password and then it gives you an access control key it will allow you to get to whatever resources you're allowed to use on the network if you're using a Linux they have something called a Samba server si MBA it works much like the old Windows NT primary domain controllers so it's not as robust and it's not as a fully functional as the new Windows 2008 Active Directory servers but it does allow you to have one single place where people can log into on the network and get access to different resources Active Directory was created by Novell originally and Novell NetWare also has it as an option for this type of server so so the first type of server that you're probably used to dealing with is the security the authentication server all this server does is allows you to send your credentials if your username password go to it and then it sends a key back to your computer to allow you to get to accesses and resources on the network that's all it does so we thought talked about the authentication the next type of server that you're probably most familiar with is something called a print server so back in the day back 15 years ago what you used to do is you used to have a computer on the network you would plug a printer into that computer and then you would share the the printer to the rest of the network so you could have one printer connected to a computer and then a hundred people could then through that computer print out so that was a practice server like i said back in the day they had very very specialized servers that all that's all they did so all print server does is allows you to share a local printer on the network well that was kind of expensive so the most common solution after that was HP it came up with these what we're called and you get direct print servers so there were these little gray boxes of they kind of look like little little switches that you might buy at Best Buy right now and what you can do is it had one port for the network and one port for an HP printer so this HP jetdirect press server would would act like a normal printer we're going to allow people to print to that printer so you can have a hundred people basically sharing one printer as time went by that print server that HP jetdirect print server became an HP jetdirect card so it went from being a box to just being a card that you could slide in as an additional accessory to the numerators that came out as time progressed beyond that then the print server got built in to the printer so now printers have built in printer servers so just just keep this in mind when people are talking about print servers is now in 2010 most of the time print servers the actual print server is built in to the printer and you just plug the network cable directly into that printer it works on the same ideas as when you used to have a computer plugging the printer is just all down into a single print so that's what a print server is is it's simply a computer that allows other people to print through it nowadays you may still like if you have a small office or in your home you may have a desktop computer that acts as a print server so you may have a print server that way but but that's that's all a print server is so pass the authentication server and the print server we then have the file server if you're probably very very used to this is where you have having a network share so you have a folder that's share it on the network and everybody in the office can just get into that share and open up or modify do whatever they want to the files that are inside the share that's all a file server is it is simply a computer that has a share folder or shared folders with shared files that people on the network can access banners there's not a lot to it this year that's all there is so now we start coming to things that you may not think about that that you may not be used to thinking about with servers the next thing is web and FTP servers so this is a server that you go to and it presents you a website so this is a server like every man Haida t.com is presented on when you come to our server it gives you a website there are there are two main pieces of software available that are for websites there's either a pantry a PA CHP which is open source and free it can be used on any operating system to allow that operates in system to be a full-fledged web server or in the windows world there is something called iis internet information server there is a version built into all Windows operating systems if you deal with Windows Server so Windows Server 2008 operating systems you have the full-fledged version of iis and you can present a world class website using that if you have Windows 7 or Windows Vista or Windows XP they have a version of I is built into those two but it's not as robust they don't allow you as many connections don't quote me on it but I think they only allow like 20 concurrent connections at a time so only 20 people can be on your website at any one time so the two types of web servers out there are Apache and I is again Apache can be installed on Windows and MS on and max it can be installed on Linux can be installed on anything IIS can only be installed on Windows computers now along with the web server that provides you websites you also normally have something called an FTP server this is something called File Transfer Protocol File Transfer Protocol allows you to transfer files from one place together so if you're trying to upload files onto your website you would TP this is different than a normal like a file server a file server uses a special protocol in order to transfer transfer files back and forth FTP it uses a different protocol to transfer files back and forth but normally FTP servers are servers that normally sit on the internet and allow you to upload large files to them for whatever reason and they're normally included with web servers so after web servers and ftp servers we now have mail servers so these are servers especially designed or software specially designed to Rao email so what you do with an email server is you set it up in your office and then all the email for your company so if you have a hundred people all the email for your company will go into that one single server and then that server will decide what to do with it it'll it'll set it out to wherever it needs to go most people are used to Microsoft Exchange servers so with Microsoft Exchange servers all the email comes into the exchange server and then whenever anybody logs in using Outlook they're able to get all their email off of that server or if they have smartphones or you know iPhones or such that exchange server can also send emails to to whoever it needs to go to to their smart phones so the email server actually routes email for a company or foreign organization the most common email server again in Microsoft Exchange in order to use Microsoft Exchange you have to have a Windows Server it will only run on Windows if you don't want to use Microsoft Exchange there's a whole slew of other types of email software out there some of its free some of it's very expensive some of it only runs on Linux some of it only runs on Windows it's all depends on what you decide to use and what do you decide to buy but the main thing is what mail servers do is they they take all the email for your organization and then they route it to the right people so the next type of server is a database server so databases all they do is store data they store data and allow outside applications to to to put data into it to pull that out to manipulate the data that's there but all databases do all that worried about his death they don't have they don't have fancy interfaces they don't they don't look cool they're just basically you know they're there like a lot of things all you get is a little dose prompt and you have to type in these long sequel statements if you want to get anything out of it normally but outside pieces of software can't interact with a database server and like I say they can either put in data or pull out data so if you have a comp customer contact database that you would use this let's say if you have a ticketing system ticketing systems use databases so it gathers all the information from a ticket and puts it into a single database most of the time database servers reside in the same server as a web server so let's say like this website everyman IT has a database as part of the website so there is a my sequel server installed alongside the Apache server software that runs the website but all databases do is they just a database servers do is they just handle down the most popular database software and the web world is something called my sequel which is free and open source there is also Microsoft sequel which is not free it's very expensive it will only run on Microsoft sequel servers and then of course you probably also know of Oracle which again is horribly expensive and runs on all of its own stuff but basically all database servers do is they just they just deal with that they just they don't they don't really do anything fancy with it they just store it and allow you to access it or put stuff into it so the final type of server that we're going to talk about is a remote access server so nowadays these are normally VPN servers or virtual private networks back in the day they used to have dial-up servers that would actually have little modem cards in them and you can actually dial in to the server but nowadays we're normally just dealing with with VPN so what the remote access server does is allows you to connect to the server and then from there get access to the rest of the network so if you're out on the internet and you have a piece of VPN software and you have this remote access server so it's a VPN server you can connect through the internet to that server and once you've connected to that server you get the resources that are that are in in that local network so imagine if you wanted to print to a printer that's that's in an office 500 miles away you would use you would connect to the server in that office using something called VPN and then once you've connected to that server it's as if you're on that local network and so you could then print to that printer but basically all the remote access servers do is they allow you to connect to the internal network from the outside world from the internet and then once you've done that then it's like you're basically as far as the network is concerned your local or you can use all of the local resources you can print your local printer you can get your email just like you're in the building that's all remote access proud server is so we've discussed a lot of things in this introduction to service class it may take a while for Fertile tall digest so so so don't worry servers are a whole new world compared to simply dealing with with desktop computers all servers are remember all all s server is just a normal server all a server is is a computer that provides services to other computers so if you if you have a printer plugged into the back of your computer and you have shared that printer out so somebody else on the network can print to it then you have a printer if you have a shared folder on your computer so other people can access that folder then you have a file server although servers you know that that is what a server is it just provides services there is a difference between servers and servers servers like I say you know you can you can use a windows xp home edition computer to be a basic server you can have it be a web server you can I would be a file server can I be a print server you can how to do most of the functions that those servers can do but it's not as stable it's not as robust and you know it there's much more chance that something will go hinky with it than with it with a Enterprise a server so so yeah they're they're cheaper but but they're not as robust whereas servers you know use server operating systems so whether it's Windows 2008 server Edition you're using or whether it's bun to Linux server Edition or Red Hat Enterprise Linux server Edition or Mac OS 10 server Edition that server software is built for servers and therefore of course you try to play video games on it it's not going to be as good as that desktop computer but it is very good for file sharing for web this it-- for for authentication servers and the rest of that real servers are meant to deal with a lot of communication with the outside world again authentication server can deal with up to 10,000 clients so for every 10,000 users you can have we can have one of these windows 2008 service now there's the hardware that we've talked about again you can use any hardware you can go out and you can buy a $200 a machine or you can go out and you can buy a netbook and use it as a server if you want to it doesn't matter Igor it doesn't matter you don't have to use really high quality parts for a server but if you're like me and you have your server in a data center and your life kinda depends on it then there there is specific hardware that you should have for your server this includes a xeon processor so so a processor designed for servers this includes redundant power supplies so if one power supply fails one of those power module fails the computer stays up and running and you simply spot the pull out the bad power supply and put the new one in this includes rate this is where you have multiple hard drives with redundancy so if one hard drive fails you can pull the bad hard drive out and put a new hard drive in and again the computer doesn't doesn't go down there's no problems and again there is something called ECC Ram this is Error error checking Ram it actually does tests on itself again this is much better Ram and it ensures you have less problems with your server but in my book it is so much more expensive that I'm not gonna mess with it I don't put it in my servers but it's there so so the server hardware you know depending on what you're doing depends on what you want to buy if you're sharing out some files with five people in the office by all means by that omission if you're if you have a server that's it in a data center somewhere that can never crash then they get real server hardware we just talked about all the functionality that a lot of these servers can have there's even more there is there's so many things servers can do but I gave you that the basic rundown of the common things that most people use servers for again all these different functions are simply pieces of software just like you would install on a desktop computer so you know a desktop computer can do more than word can do Word and Excel in PowerPoint and Photoshop and Firefox so a server can do authentication and be a file server and be a web server and the a database or and be a remote access server all in one one box and don't don't think you have to have one server for you these individual things as we talked about Windows 2008 servers come with all these components already built in and you basically just have to turn them on and configure them if you use Linux you almost always have to install these different services separately and again a lot of functionality that I talked about you can install onto a Windows XP home computer but you do have to download the software to allow that to happen we talked about the authentication service all this is is when you log into the network it's what allows you access to the things you should have access to that's all an authentication server does we talked about the print servers this allows you know one one printer to be shared by multiple people on the network we talked about you know back in the day it was a big computer is a big actual server and then HP came out with these things called yet direct devices and then those became cards and then that all just got built into the printer itself so you may see that the printer has an internal print server and that's what they're talking about file servers again this is just shared files on the network web server so you either use something called a path you or I is to provide websites the people that go to your server just like this website here almost always if you have a web server you also have an FTP server this is a way to transfer files back and forth over the Internet it does so in a different way than a normal file server does so they kind of do the same thing but in a different way so an FTP server is different than a file server that's very important to remember we talked about mail servers these are simply servers that route mail for an organization so all the email for any organization comes into one server and then that server decides what to do with it so many times the server will have em filters built-in or having a BlackBerry Enterprise Server built-in so it'll it'll filter out the spam and then we'll send emails to the appropriate BlackBerry devices or smartphone devices again the most popular mail server out there is something called exchange Microsoft Exchange Server and this is Microsoft product and of course can only be installed on to Microsoft servers can't be installed on anything else there are a slew a lot of other mail servers out there on the market some can only be used on Windows some cannot be used on Linux some are free some are very expensive so if you don't want to use exchange you just got to go out there and do some research talk about database servers database servers all they do is they just store down and then you store it very very very well this is used for things like contact database systems ticket management systems etc and then finally we talked about the remote access service these are the servers that allow people from the outside world to connect to them and then use resources on the internal network so basically you know you're sitting in Bangkok you need to use something that's local in an office in New York you use VPN virtual private network to connect to that New York office and then you're able to access resources on that local network is if you're sitting sitting there just on a little slower connection and that's really that that's the introduction of service this is gonna be a long this is going to be a long track that's going to take nee quite a while to fill out so don't don't feel bad if this this seems a little a little confusing right at the moment I just wanted to give you this brief introduction just just so you can start getting your head around what servers are because like I say most people learn about servers from from vendor specific classes like I say when I first learned about servers I only learn about Microsoft servers I had friends all they learned about was no bail I had other people all they learned about was Linux and so when you're so specific on the products you don't really get such a good idea on the your world and how everything else else works and what options that you or your clients have the real world advice that I will give to that I've seen happen far too often is if you have a special piece of software or your client has a special piece of software and you're told that it needs to run on a server make sure you find out what the people mean by server I have seen a lot of people when I had the repair shop that they would go out and they would buy these four and five thousand dollar servers because they need they were they were told they needed a server in order to run some piece of software these servers were very expensive they're very they're more expensive to maintain because I mean you do need to be certified you do you need more knowledge to maintain them than you do to maintain a desktop computer etc and then when I would call whoever created the program and just just trying to figure out what's going on and say yeah it says it needs a server now why does it need a Windows 2008 server they said oh no no no it just it just needs a dedicated computer so so you can just have a Windows XP professional computer as the server it doesn't have to be a Windows 2008 server so that's something that happens in the real world and I've seen it happen way too often where people think they need one of these very very very powerful servers for a five-person office because you know again they buy some piece of software they were told they need a server to run it well remember the definition of a server is simply a computer that provides services to clients so before you or your client went out it's been three four or five thousand dollars on a very robust enterprise class server make sure that little eMachine won't do don't do just fine um keep that in mind really things will be a lot better for you so so as always I hope you've kept up with me this will be a long and interesting track and we have a lot of information / but but it's it's good servers servers make the world go round but again this class was introduction to servers I and Eli the computer guy and I look forward to seeing you at the next class

Channel: Eli the Computer Guy

Views: 1,385,454

Rating: 4.9138827 out of 5

Keywords: intro, servers, 720p

Id: CDxaRfwzFrs

Length: 53min 40sec (3220 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 17 2011