What really separates a PC from a server? Mainly the hardware, but I guess software too.

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Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨whostosay@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨nostupidquestions@lemmy.world⁩

In title, can elaborate if needed.

Edit: thanks everyone, I ended up deciding on an m920q for the server.

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VinesNFluff@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
A server can just be a PC left working in a corner, depnding on what specifically you’re doing with it. Hardware designed to be a server tends to have more power in the places that matter for that job and less (if any) power dedicated to home use stuff like graphics.

I have a server for my family (WELL mostly me and my father). It consists of an old gaming PC with Linux Server Stuff installed on it. Doesn’t need to be anything more, it’s just Emby (media, mostly films) and NAS stuff.

It’s mostly intent and what you run on it.

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DirigibleProtein@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Technically, only intent.

I can run a samba or plex server, for example, from my raspberry Pi, my desktop pc, or my laptop. These can all be considered servers as well as desktop PCs.

I could, in theory, buy a secondhand rackmount server from eBay and run it at home as a “desktop” pc with windows or Linux.

More practically, hardware architecture that provides redundancy and continuous uptime. A commercial enterprise server could have multiple hot-swap hard disks in a raid array, redundant and hot-swappable power supplies, and something in the back of my mind tells me that even RAM and CPU can be hot-swappable in some models (am I thinking of IBM power or did I imagine it?).

The advent of cloud and virtual machines could work towards making hardware redundancy and continuous uptime obsolete, but there are cases where servers on premises continue to be used and preferred.

I hope that others will correct me and add further information.

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NoxAstrum@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
The only definite distinction is that one provides the service, and the other uses the service.

There is absolutely zero requirement for the hardware or software to be different, aside from changing the configuration to perform the desired task.

You can have two exactly identical machines, one can be a DHCP server, and the other a client. The only difference is that one is configured to act as a DCHP server. This doesn’t need different software necessarily, just different settings.

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