How do servers communicate with each other

Asked 11 years, 6 months ago. Active 4 years, 6 months ago. Viewed 12k times. How could a network of servers communicate with each other? I'm really dumbfounded on this, so any help would be nice :. Improve this question.

Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Kaivosukeltaja Kaivosukeltaja Scott Stensland David Gelhar David Gelhar What are you looking to accomplish, or are you just curious? SqlRyan SqlRyan Timothy Timothy 4, 6 6 gold badges 37 37 silver badges 68 68 bronze badges. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. For the purposes of this article, we will only be talking about file servers and what you need to know about them in order to implement them in your video post-production workflow.

Usually, a file server is used to communicate with client computers over a local network. What that means is that in order for you to achieve good speeds in your data transfer between server and clients usually the server will be physically present in the building and will be connected to your client computer Mac, Windows, Linux via a cable.

Imagine you have a number of video editors and all of them need to access the same video and project files. Now, to avoid every editor copying the same footage and projects locally on their computer or an external drive, your company may purchase a file server, a. This is where you will keep all of the footage and project files.

All of your video editors can access the shared storage to work from the same files and collaborate on the same project. As we know, video files can get quite large especially, when shooting in 4K resolution and raw formats. A cable connection instead of wifi will ensure good and stable communication between your server and your client machines.

This will make uninterrupted real-time video playback possible even if you are editing a multicam video. Here, we will only focus on the importance of software compatibility between server and clients. The server is a computer. It may be more powerful, it has more storage capacity and it has different features from your personal computer but it is a computer. It has its own operating system, file system, interface and it uses different services to communicate with client computers.

Those services are called networking protocols. Here, we will cover the most popular ones when it comes to video post-production workflow. What are the differences and similarities, pros and cons and when you should use what. The goal with connecting your server to your computer is to see the server as a shared volume on your Mac, PC or Linux client.

That will allow you, for example, to create a video project in your video editing application on one computer, import some video files in the project and organize them. And if you store your project file on that shared volume the server , you would be able to open that project from another client computer connected to the server.

The action of connecting the server to the client and having it show up as a shared drive is called mounting. Each OS has built-in, generic protocols of mounting network storage. These protocols have a base level of functionality that most any OS will understand. The Internet is a global network which connects all the users of the world and they can communicate at any time with each other from different places because they belong to the same network.

A network is a group of interconnections. It can be a group of smaller networks too. A computer network uses two or more computers that are linked to each other with network medium.

Users in the same network can use the same hardware a printer or software same programs and transmit different kinds of data like text, video, voice etc. Hardware is used to link each other for example the wire cables, the optical fibers or wirelessly connections. Photo by Jonathan on Unsplash. Networks are divided into two different types. Those types are the local area networks and the wide area networks. The main difference is the range of connectivity within the network.

By its name you can understand that the LAN Local Area Network can connect a smaller range of computers because it is based locally. You can think that the local network focuses on connecting people that have something in common, for example the computers in a school class to let the students or the staff communicate or the computers of a company.

The LAN can be a secure network only accessed and used by them. Also how the network identifies the sender and the recipient is explained below. Here comes the WAN which connects networks from larger geographical areas. WAN is used to transmit data between long distance areas or between different networks that are connected to a bigger one. The speed of a WAN can be slower than LAN because of their amount of users and complexity but it depends on its settings.

The Internet is a kind of a WAN, right? Now we have a LAN already created. All the computers that belong in the same network we can connect them with a common cable which is called the Ethernet.

When computer A actually there is a user there wants to send a message to computer B the message travels within the cable and goes into every computer in the network because they share the same medium. But how does the network know the recipient of the message? The message has a final destination, a recipient who waits to read the message and probably wants to exchange information back too. For the router to solve this problem every computer has a unique MAC address.

This address ensures that the physical address of the computer is unique. Every standalone computer has a dedicated address given by their ISP. The IP Internet Protocol address is unique for every computer that is connected to the network and of course defines them so that the computer can be recognizable. Separating by periods the IP address is four 8bit numbers like The Internet Protocol helps to send data in the same network. The data are sent via network packets.

Every computer has a static IP and a public IP. Your computer has a private IP dedicated to it. This IP is stored in the router. The router has a routing table which collects all the private IP addresses mobile, laptop etc that are connected to this network.

In every network you connect the ISP of the network assigns you a different IP for example if you connect to a public network like Starbucks the IP will change and provided by the provider that Starbucks works with. The router helps a device to connect to the global network the Internet with a different IP, the public IP.

Public addresses can be dynamic or static but for now we will not stick into that. I just want you to understand that your computer connects to a network and the network can identify it from its IP address. Within the network your computer can communicate with other computers that are interconnected with an Ethernet or a switch to the same network.

The Ethernet cable is a common medium for every computer in the network. Switch can be used to split the wired network. Multiple cables are connected to the switch which is responsible for data transmission. So if computer A wants to send data to computer B switch does not transmit the signal to all the computers that are connected.

Switch keeps the MAC addresses and forward the message only where is necessary. Switch helps the network to avoid collisions. Photo by Thomas Jensen on Unsplash. Now this is the place where computers communicate with each other. Linux: Ctrl-Alt-T and type ifconfig. Computer communications uses protocols which establish a set of rules for the communication to be successful and error free.

The protocol architecture can let the data to transmit from a computer to another within a specific set of operations using hardware and software. Every process like communication for example is defined by a model. This model has seven layers. It is a journey between different layers. Every layer uses different protocols. Every protocol can use different hardware or software.