It s All about Sharing Resources

It's All about Sharing Resources

The mechanics of requesting resources depend on having access to the right software tools to determine when network requests are necessary. The software delivers the request to a server whose job is to listen for such requests and to satisfy all legitimate ones. Ultimately, a server's job is to make resources available to all authorized users. This feature makes sharing possible and helps explain the most powerful benefit of networking namely, to provide a single, consistent way for multiple users to obtain secure and managed access to files, printers, scanners , data, applications, and more.

The secret to sharing is to find a way to make sure that everyone can obtain access to a shared resource. For example, for access to print services, a temporary storage space must hold incoming print jobs until each one's turn to be printed comes up. Therefore, sharing a printer means not only providing access to the device itself, but also keeping track of who's in line, providing a place where pending jobs can reside, and sometimes notifying users when a print job has been successfully completed. All these mechanisms make sharing work easier and explain why servers are so important to any network.

Because servers bring services and data together in a single machine, servers provide a natural point of control and maintenance for the important devices, services, and data on a network, which are, of course, the things that everybody wants to share.