Servers

How the internet works:

The internet allows us to do many different things such as browse social networking sites such as face book, twitter etc.

There are different types of components that work together to provide us with internet access. These are hardware and software components and I am now going to look at these in more detail.

Web serversA web server stores all the websites on the computer system which allows us to connect to the internet. When users are searching for a website they type in an IP address such as www.google.com.

The web server then recognises this as a range of different numbers. These are then converted into an ISP address.

Mail servers

This is a hardware device which stores your emails that you send to others and also allows you to receive your emails. Users should ensure that they have the use of firewalls installed into their computers as this prevents hackers from seeing the emails that you send to others.

Proxy servers

This is a server connected to the internet which prevents users from using certain websites. This may be for security reasons and most organisations such as SRC will have proxy servers for example to prevent students from accessing social networking sites i.e. Facebook etc.

The proxy server does all the work of connecting to the Web server. The main reasons for using a proxy are anonymity, security, speed and filtering.

Router

A router decides which path should be used to gather network data between the servers and the computer systems.

The router helps computers find each other in order for the IP address to connect to your internet.

Software

There are different types of software that are required in order for the internet to work effectively. These are:

• Web server applications
• Web browser applications
• Mail client software

 I am now going to look at these in more detail:

Web server application

This is a piece of software that runs on web server hardware. Its job is to retrieve files from the server’s hard drive, format the files for the Web browser, and send them out via the internet. This is also connected to the internet.

Web browser

There are many different web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Opera. Without these web browsers the user will not be able to access the internet.

The users web browser is built into the computer and are also free to download.



Mail client software

This is the software used for the users emails such as yahoo, hotmail, msn etc. This allows users to compose ne emails, read incoming emails, send emails etc.