serv⋅er
[sur-ver] 
vər
| 1. | a person who serves. |
| 2. | something that serves or is used in serving, as a salver. |
| 3. | a broad fork, spoon, or spatula for dishing out and serving individual portions of food, as vegetables, cake, or pie. |
| 4. | Ecclesiastical. an attendant on the priest at Mass, who arranges the altar, makes the responses, etc. |
| 5. | (in tennis, badminton, handball, etc.) the player who puts the ball or shuttlecock in play. |
| 6. | a computer that makes services, as access to data files, programs, and peripheral devices, available to workstations on a network. Compare client (def. 5), file server. |
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.
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| serv·er (sûr'vər) n.
|
Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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Server
Serv"er\, n. 1. One who serves. 2. A tray for dishes; a salver. --Randolph.Cite This Source
Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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server
n. A kind of daemon that performs a service for the requester and which often runs on a computer other than the one on which the server runs. A particularly common term on the Internet, which is rife with `web servers', `name servers', `domain servers', `news servers', `finger servers', and the like.Cite This Source
| server (sûr'vər) Pronunciation Key
A computer that manages centralized data storage or network communications resources. A server provides and organizes access to these resources for other computers linked to it. |
Copyright © 2002. Published by Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved.
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server
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.
[The Jargon File]
(2003-12-29)
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